832 words, 4 minutes read time.
Performance isn’t a film that was made so much as summoned. It came out of the restless mind of Donald Cammell — a painter and dabbler in the occult with aristocratic roots and a taste for provocation. When he teamed up with cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, Warner Bros. expected something vaguely in the style of A Hard Day’s Night, especially with Mick Jagger in the lead. What they got instead was something murky, psychedelic, violent, and deeply unsettling.
The film was shot in 1968 but shelved for two years. Studio bosses were horrified by what they saw — not just the sex and violence, but the overall tone: disjointed, claustrophobic, and morally ambiguous. Footage was cut or lost, and what finally made it to cinemas in 1970 had already been through a long battle behind the scenes.
For years it was seen as a curiosity — a film that didn’t quite belong anywhere. But as time passed, it grew into something else: a kind of underground classic, passed between those who recognised it as one of the most radical pieces of British cinema ever made.
Plot and Performances
The story, on paper, is simple. Chas (James Fox) is a brutal London gangster who’s fallen out with his bosses and is on the run. He hides out in a crumbling Notting Hill house occupied by Turner (Mick Jagger), a faded rock star who’s retreated into a fog of drugs, sex, and mysticism. The two men come from completely different worlds, but as the film goes on, they start to blur into one another.
Fox is convincing as Chas — all cold eyes and repressed fury. He reportedly spent time with real gangsters to prepare, and it shows. Jagger, by contrast, plays Turner as a mercurial figure — part shaman, part clown, part seducer. His performance is slippery, deliberately hard to pin down. He teases Chas, mocks him, tempts him. Their scenes together are charged with tension, both violent and erotic.
Also in the mix are Anita Pallenberg and Michèle Breton as Turner’s companions. The atmosphere inside the house is one of louche decadence — baths, mushrooms, mirrors, music. Reality bends. At a certain point, it’s no longer clear where one man ends and the other begins.
Themes and Style
The film is obsessed with identity — what it is, how it shifts, what’s underneath it. Chas arrives in Turner’s world with a firm sense of self: he’s a hard man, he’s dangerous, he knows who he is. But in that strange, enclosed space, the boundaries begin to dissolve. There’s sex, but there’s also role-play, theatre, transformation. Everyone is performing, all the time.
Cammell and Roeg reflect this in how they shoot the film. It’s full of sudden cuts, overlapping images, repeated motifs. Scenes don’t unfold so much as echo and reverberate. There’s a dream logic to it all — or maybe a nightmare one. At one point, Jagger’s character performs a musical number dressed as a gangster, while Fox seems to lose his grip on time altogether. It’s disorientating by design.
This isn’t just style for the sake of it. The editing, the pacing, the visuals — they’re all part of the film’s central idea: that identity is unstable, that we are shaped by those around us, that slipping into someone else’s skin is both seductive and terrifying.
Legacy and Influence
When it was finally released, Performance was met with confusion, disdain, and a bit of quiet admiration. It didn’t fit the usual categories, and most people didn’t know what to do with it. But gradually, its reputation grew. Today, it’s widely seen as a landmark — a film that broke rules, ignored convention, and got away with it.
It’s influenced everything from British gangster films to music videos. Directors like Danny Boyle, Jonathan Glazer, and Nicolas Winding Refn owe it a debt, whether they admit it or not. You can feel its fingerprints on Trainspotting, Sexy Beast, Under the Skin. Its use of sound, music, and fractured narrative was years ahead of its time.
For Jagger, it remains a career high point — not in terms of popularity, but in how close it got to the myth of who he was: not just a rock star, but a kind of cultural shape-shifter. Fox, too, gave something rare — after this role, he took a long break from acting, shaken by the experience.
Performance isn’t an easy film. It resists interpretation. But for those willing to go with it, it offers something that very few films do: a genuine sense of danger. It’s a film that stares into the void — and smiles.
By Pat Harrington
🎬 Available Editions
- Criterion Collection 4K UHD + Blu-ray (UK Only)
- Click here to buy
- Description: This edition includes a 4K digital restoration approved by producer Sandy Lieberson, with uncompressed monaural original-UK-version soundtrack. It also features several documentaries and special features, such as Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance and Influence and Controversy: Making “Performance”.
- Standard DVD Edition
- Click here to buy
- Description: This is a standard DVD release of the film.
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