Performance

1970

Action / Crime / Drama / Romance

12
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 82% · 34 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 78% · 5K ratings
IMDb Rating 6.7/10 10 11283 11.3K

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Plot summary

In underworld terms, Chas Devlin is a 'performer,' a gangster with a talent for violence and intimidation. Turner is a reclusive rock superstar. When Chas and Turner meet, their worlds collide—and the impact is both exotic and explosive.


Uploaded by: OTTO
April 18, 2014 at 10:48 AM

Director

Top cast

Ian McShane as Noel - Black Musican
James Fox as Chas
Jane Lapotaire as Mrs. Farrell
Mick Jagger as Turner
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
810.90 MB
1280*720
English 2.0
R
23.976 fps
1 hr 45 min
Seeds 3
1.64 GB
1920*1080
English 2.0
R
23.976 fps
1 hr 45 min
Seeds 15

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by planktonrules 2 / 10

A film for a small, select few.

"Performance" is seen today by some as some sort of classic film, though back when it first debuted, it was seen as smut. Even by today's standards, the nudity is a bit surprising, though for me that was far less bothersome than the actual filmmaking. To me, it's very amateurish in style and is about as much fun as a migraine.

The film begins with some mobster thugs out beating up and threatening folks. One of them (Edward Fox) seems particularly psychotic and even has the chutzpah to disrespect his boss...and soon he's kidnapped and beaten. He also ends up murdering one of his captors and escaping. Needing a place to hide out, he wanders into a bohemian home where a down-and-out rock star (Mick Jagger) and his weird friends live.

Apparently, when the film was screened originally, most of the audience walked out and the film was shelved and released two years later after re-edits. I have no idea if the version shown on TCM was the first or later version, but the film stood out for me because of its technical deficiencies. The editing, at times, seemed random, the acting often poor and the story just seemed, at times, to be rudderless. It certainly was NOT an enjoyable viewing experience and is a film that average person would likely skip. For some children of the 60s, perhaps it's enjoyable based on the number of very positive reviews here on IMDB...but I really cannot imagine they represent the average viewer.

Reviewed by grantss 3 / 10

I guess you have to be high to enjoy this

A gangster is on the run from his former colleagues after killing one of them. He finds refuge in a house owned by a former pop star.

A film that was clearly made for the psychedelia of the late 60s and early 70s. Plot is close to non-existent, there's heaps of jarring cuts, random imagery and generally a vast excess of style over substance. What plot development there is would probably take up 15 of the 105 minutes, the rest is just filler.

So weird, empty and nonsensical I assume the idea was that audiences had to be high to enjoy it, or even come close to making sense of it.

In terms of performances, James Fox does his best to make sense of the script. Mick Jagger is just there for his star power and because he basically gets to play himself. Supporting cast are very weak, to the point of being atrocious in some cases (e.g. Johnny Shannon as Harry Flowers - hammy to the max). So bad they make Jagger look like an actor.

Reviewed by lasttimeisaw 7 / 10

PERFORMANCE is more stultifying than stupefying from the POV of a first-time viewer in the 21st century

Wringing the ethos out of the vestige of beatnik and swinging 60s, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's hallucinogenic cult film PERFORMANCE (which marks both filmmakers' directorial feature debut), was made in 1968 but mothballed by the studio for two years due to its obscene sexual contents and explicit violence.

For a new audience, it is fairly natural to get dumbfounded by the film's frenetic editing of montages from the very start, amalgamating graphic sex sequences between our protagonist Chas (Fox) and his casual bed-mate Dana (Sidney) with manifold clumps of irrelevant scenes which later rig up a flimsy narrative, it is a sharp, disorientating gambit, but seems too divisive by half (it is a post-production last resort to mitigate the smutty images at the expense of its own impetus and coherence as a dauntless cause célèbre by this reviewer's lights).

Chaz is an aggro-prone tearaway working for the gang of Harry Flowers (a corn-fed Johnny Shannon), but before long he needs to lie low after rubbing out an attacker of bad blood out of self-defense, since Harry wants him vanish as well. So he hangs his hat in the basement of a decrepit residence owned by a former rock star Turner (Mick Jagger's acting debut), who has lost his demon in what he does and secludes himself from the outside world, co-habits with his lover Pherber (the late Pallenberg, a là Warhol's Factory Girl) and a young French girl Lucy (a tomboyish Breton), the equilibrium of their boho ménage-à-trois will dutifully be ruffled (not exactly challenged as we tend to surmise judging by its cover) by Chaz, an unbidden outsider under the pseudonym of Johnny Dean.

The premise sounds promising for making a heavy weather of the underlying discrepancy/assimilation between two male ids: Chaz's macho/gangsta make-up and Turner's androgynous and lackadaisical stagnation, but in reality, however visually psychedelic the film looks (Dutch angles, a distorted God's viewpoint shot, mesmeric mirror images, that creepy identity-shifting moment in the end, just to name a few), the fundamentals are only scratched skin- deep, often to one's aggravation, instead, it evolves into a dashing and dazing shindig of excesses (nudity rather than sex) and a madcap platform for Turner/Jagger's superstar glamour (who performs the theme song MEMO FROM TURNER in the MTV style, avant la lettre).

Notorious for its under-the-influence verité carried out during the filmmaking (there is literal acid involved in the plot where Chaz and co. terrorizing a hapless chauffeur), PERFORMANCE ultimately comes off as a short-range stunner and an experimental novelty which cannot elevate its own perversity and subversion into something significantly revolutionary and groundbreaking, although James Fox is arguably in his most absorbing and ambiguously sensual form here. At odds with the state of those participated, PERFORMANCE is more stultifying than stupefying from the POV of a first-time viewer in the 21st century, that ship has long sailed, save for its skirling soundtrack, operatively transmitting those signs of bygone times into one's nostalgic delirium.

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