Performance (Roeg/Cammell, 1970): Rio Cinema, 11.30pm
The daddy of midnight movies which was a weekly feature of the late-night cinema circuit in London in the 70s and 80s, showing in a pristine 35mm print. Not to be missed.
I'm busy reading Colin McCabe's BFI Film Classics book, a wonderful introduction to what the author calls "the greatest British film ever made."
Time Out review:
Nicholas Roeg's debut as a director is a virtuoso juggling act which manipulates
its visual and verbal imagery so cunningly that the borderline between
reality and fantasy is gradually eliminated. The first half-hour is
straight thriller enough to suggest a Kray Bros documentary as James Fox,
enforcer for a London protection racket, goes about his work with such
relish that he involves the gang in a murder and has to hide from
retribution in a Notting Hill basement. There, waiting to escape abroad,
he becomes involved with a fading pop star (Mick Jagger) brooding in exile
over the loss of his powers of incantation. In what might be described
(to borrow from Kenneth Anger) as an invocation to his demon brother,
the pop star recognises his lost power lurking in the blind impulse to
violence of his visitor, and so teases and torments him with
drug-induced psychedelics that the latter responds in the only way he
knows how: by rewarding one mind-blowing with another, at gunpoint.
Ideas in profusion here about power and persuasion and performance ('The
only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is one that
achieves madness'); and the latter half becomes one of Roeg's most
complex visual kaleidoscopes as pop star and enforcer coalesce in a
marriage of heaven and hell (or underworld and underground) where the
common denominator is Big Business.
Here is the trailer.
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