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| Devlin (James Fox) Finds himself submitting to the seductive wiles of Pherber (Anita Pallenberg). |
A distant cousin to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), Performance tracks Devlin's descent from London's seedy criminal scene into a Dionysian netherworld populated by rock 'n' roll hedonists. The sadistic Devlin is a "performer" — British mob lingo for an enforcer — but one day he takes his love of the job just a bit too far. Shirking the orders of bookie boss Harry Flowers (John Shannon), Devlin murders a rival racketeer and former friend. On the lam from the coppers and his corrupt colleagues, Devlin flees to the funky Notting Hill district.
There, the beleaguered thug seeks sanctuary in a basement flat owned by washed-up pop icon Turner (played with amoral gusto by Rolling Stone frontman Mick Jagger), a fey androgyne coping with the loss of his creative muse by indulging in a sordid sabbatical of sex and substance abuse. In the larger frame shown above, Devlin gets the night-nurse treatment from Pherber (Anita Pallenberg, then the girlfriend of Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards), who, along with French waif Lucy (Michele Breton) participates in the film's madcap ménage à quatre.
After Pherber garnishes Devlin's dinner with a magic mushroom, Roeg lets loose with some truly abstract images. His deft mix of psychedelic hues, quick cuts, shallow focus, superimposed shots and quease-inducing zooms led one reviewer to remark, "Witnessing Roeg's unruly visual style is like being trapped in a cave filled with flying bats."
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| Turner (Mick Jagger) dashes off a musical memo. |
By this time, Roeg had already established himself as a uniquely talented cameraman with a resumé that included Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death, Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, John Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd and Richard Lester's Petunia. Nevertheless, Warner Brothers executives found Performance's radical visuals — not to mention its nonlinear narrative — so perplexing that its theatrical distribution was held up for nearly two years after its completion while the powers-that-be re-edited the picture.
Roeg also did double duty on another 1970 release, Walkabout, a tale of two children lost in the lusciously photographed Australian outback. Soon after, he helmed two more adventurous efforts, Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth. The latter film, a sci-fi allegory about alienation, starred pansexual poster boy David Bowie, whose onstage antics as glam-rocker Ziggy Stardust would, along with Performance, eventually influence Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine
— Andrew O. Thompson