This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Powerful

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

I remember upon the film's release in 1970 that it wasn't the film most people expected. It wasn't the film I had expected. The Rolling Stones were not The Beatles, so this was never going to be A Hard Day's Night but even so for this to begin as a very violent and hard edged London crime gang movie a la Krays and not even feature Jagger for the first third, upset a lot of people. Viewed today, over forty years on, especially on Blu-ray, it is a revelation.Back in the day, so much had changed between 1968, when the film was made and 1970 when it was eventually released that some of us failed to appreciate how true a picture of disillusion it really was. Those dark and mysterious corners now fully illuminated and the milieu of the time so perfectly captured. Jagger's performance is quite amazing, as is that of the recently departed Anita Pallenberg. Some of the quick cut, fast edits anticipate Roeg's Don't Look Now opening but much of the latter part of the film takes place in a murky bath or large bed. The decor and language seem perfect with all the nonsense making complete sense. Fabulous and invigorating. James Fox isn't bad either!

I saw this film about a dozen times at a tiny art-house theater off the Sunset Strip. It's not what you think it might be with the casting of Ms. Pallenberg and Mick. It's an onion of a movie with layers and nuances and subtexts that require repeated viewings. It explores sexuality and power in a way that was very frightening and nihilistic to audiences--so much so that preview audiences were refunded their money.The actual violence in the beginning of the movie is a misdirect, ala the initial story line in Psycho. Mr. Fox's character screws the pooch by enjoying his work to his own detriment and has to lay low while he figures out how to leave the country and evade his former employers. He stumbles into the counterculture. Turner and his entourage take him in, in every sense of the word. Turner is pan-sexual, a Ziggy Stardust who has lost his daemon and retreated deeper into a drug-induced fugue state where the only rule is misrule.Turner's guest is an accidental tourist in a land where he doesn't speak the language or respect the culture. They slip him a mushroom omelet to loosen him up, but he sees their world in his own context, which is primal and violent.In one teaser scene, M. Jagger sits in a bathtub with a pound note as a fig leaf. Sex sells?Trying to explain this movie to someone who's never seen it is like trying to describe an acid trip to someone who's never been on one. Watch it a couple of times before you make up your mind. You may be repulsed and fascinated simultaneously. You'll love it or hate it. The soundtrack is worth the price of admission. It pushes the boundaries that were being crossed by movies like If and Clockwork Orange. It's a way- back machine to a time before Rocky Horror, The Last Tango in Paris, Inserts and other Seventies movies that challenged the sexual status quo. Gender-bender, mind-bender--you've been cautioned.

James Fox plays Chas, a East London gangster who delights in sadism, sex, misogyny and violence. He works for Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon), whose orders he disobeys by murdering a low life called Joey Maddocks. Chas is forced to go on the run, the police and Flowers' henchmen hot on his heels. The film is concerned with Chas' chameleon like transformation, as he alters himself in an attempt to remain off the radar. In this regard he dyes his hear, changes his mannerisms and ingratiates himself with the androgynous Turner, played by Rolling Stones front-man Mick Jagger. "I'm determined to fit in. I've got to fit in," he begs, and Jagger obliges, introducing Chas to hallucinogenic drugs, homosexuality, femininity and his fuzzy concepts of "love". End result: Chas drops his previous psycho-sexual, violent, dominative, masculine hangups and becomes a happy drag queen. Think of Jagger as an X rated Deepak Chopra. The film was directed by Nicolas Roeg, whose customarily unconventional editing techniques elevate the film tremendously. Roeg turns the plot into a kaleidoscopic, hallucinogenic identity crisis ("I know who I am," Chas unconvincingly repeats throughout the film), using a non linear, sliding, elliptical editing style to suggest the breaking down and piecing together of Chas' identity. For Roeg, the goal is for anima and animus to collide through technique. His shots are like the drug tainted fragments of a vast mosaic, the final image fuzzy and confusing at first, until each new added piece completes and concretizes the picture. Roeg's editing was breathtaking during this period, culminating in such great films as "Walkabout" and "Don't Look Now". The film ends with Chas transforming into Turner and vice versa, the former adopting a wig, costume and makeup. Chas' face even literally becomes Turner's and Roeg goes so far as to use mirrors and subtle shots to overlay female breasts on Chas' own chest, blurring his psycho-sexual identity. Actor James Fox found the production so disturbing and disorienting that he left acting and fled into religious retreat for nearly a decade. Mick Jagger went on to become a giant sex God.7.9/10 – Hugely influential, but somewhat dated. How do you rate a film that plays like a cross between Guy Ritchie and Catherine Breillat? Incidentally, Roeg's "The Man Who Fell To Earth" presents the flip-side of Chas' transformation, musician David Bowie transforming from androgynous, sexless rock star, to phallus incarnate.

I suppose I come to this from a slightly difficult perspective, having seen some of Nicolas Roeg's more recent films before this. Compared with the rest of his output, as far as I can see, this is far superior, but it's not so easy to judge things impartially with exposure to so much inferior work.In any case, certainly this feels like the most successful of Roeg's films. Of course, I recognise his is co-director and co-producer, but his visual style is immediately obvious. This comes with its problems. For a cinematographer, he is surprisingly shy of framing shots very carefully. There is a very spontaneous, somewhat 'wobbly' quality to much of the visuals in Performance. However, in this instance this does rather fit with the atmosphere and aesthetic of the whole thing. It is, after all, the story of a deeply troubled young man, swinging between excesses of violence, sex, cultural and social self-discovery and all that. That having been said, however, again in a rather typical Roeg foible, none of those themes is really investigated. Everything is on the outside, a simple, visual experience of a few people's lives coming into confusion with each other. Not necessarily a bad thing, but with little story to speak of, one is rather left wondering what was the point of it all.The film, though, does give a striking portrait of a particular kind of social existence, one that was current at the time of its making, but in truth is probably applicable at most times and in most places. The suggestion that the criminal and bourgeois margins of society actually have much in common in terms of the nature of their somewhat teetering existence is a valid one. It's interestingly portrayed, and certainly eccentrically so. The performances are convincing, as you would expect, and unlike David Bowie's presence in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth', you don't ever feel that Jagger is simply trading on his familiarly odd outward character - there is a genuine enigmatic quality to his performance, and it brings something to the atmosphere of the film. James Fox, again, is on good form, if often called upon to manifest a limited palette of expressions of confusion and inner turmoil - a fuller script would have benefited this.All in all, a very atmospheric film with a certain captivating music to it, and certainly the only film of Roeg's that I have ever found to be really successful.