Nemesis (USA 1992: Dir Albert Pyun)

The first of the four Nemesis films directed by the Kurosawa trained (really!) Albert Pyun, a director who gives both Fred Olen Ray and Charles Band a run for their money in shoot ‘em quick, don’t-outstay-their-welcome exploitation movies. It was Pyun who gave us the Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Cyborg back in 1989, and never a director to let a good idea go to waste, he rehashes lots of bits from that movie, plus The Terminator, Robocop, Blade Runner and the Spaghetti Western.

In fact Nemesis was originally designed to be a prequel to Cyborg but along the way this got dropped and the film developed into its own franchise. It was also intended to have a female cop in the lead but this idea also fell by the wayside. 

Nemesis introduces us to Alex (played with an Arnie-esque command of vocal cadence by French kickboxer Olivier Gruner), an already part cyborg cop, who at the beginning of the movie comes off worse after a run in with some human ‘information terrorists’ – they have information, they’re pretty terrible. Rescued by the LAPD he’s re-assembled with considerably less human in him than before and a bomb next to his heart due to detonate in three days. Suitably armed he's set off on his next and possibly final mission in Java, to do something with information and terrorists and stolen security plans and an ex-girlfriend Jared who is also a cyborg, while Farnsworth, the guy who sent him there, has been replaced by a cyborg and now wants to kill Alex  – sorry I couldn’t quite work out the finer details, but I don’t think it really matters.

From the opening shoot out, Nemesis is rather bonkers. I was transported back to the days of watching dodgy martial arts and Chuck Norris movies on VHS, such is the amount of gunfire, spent ammo, explosions and close ups of chiselled faces on display – and that’s just the women. You want to see three cyborgs blast away with heavy duty guns while facing each other over a distance of about fifteen feet – for a long time? Step this way. You want endless chop socky and over the top stunt work while rolling down mountains? Get in line. You want sparkling dialogue? Sorry, different movie.

Effects wise, breathe a sigh of relief – no CGI here. We get cyborgs with breakaway faces that reveal guns, a fantastic eyeball popping scene, and the cheesiest endoskeleton reveal that must have cost around 1/19th of the budget of a similar scene in The Terminator.

Olivier Gruner went on to a career starring in movies with one word titles. As Alex, Gruner wasn’t required to act much, but as a kick boxer he was probably annoyed that the director wanted him to use the gun more than his feet – maybe the insurance didn’t cover it. Other cast members worth noting are Tim Thomerson as mastermind Farnsworth - a veteran of TV whose career had started to slide with roles in films with one word titles and numbers after them – and spunky little Merle Kennedy as Max Impact (yes, I know) who crops up about half way through as a pint size renegade and assists Alex to evade cyborg death by doing lots of running, jumping and swimming.

You'll have to look elsewhere for coverage of Nemesis II - IV. Once is clearly enough for this keyboard slinger.

The Warriors (USA 1979: Dir Walter Hill)

Another set of film notes from one of the last FEAST Film Nights screenings back in 2017.

Walter Hill’s The Warriors, based on a 1965 dystopian novel by Sol Yurik, beams in from a pre gentrified, now vanished New York City. The movie fairly accurately reflected the decaying state of the Big Apple in the late 1970s - NYC was at the time fending off bankruptcy, suffering from high unemployment and extended power black outs (prompting widespread looting and crime) as well as playing host to pitched battles between warring ethnic factions, making the clashes between the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story look like a walk in Central Park. The reflection of reality as a future urban nightmare is a key to the movie’s genius.

Hill’s Director’s cut of the movie (the version screened tonight) adds, among other comic book inserts, an awkward short prologue not seen in the original film, which explicitly cites the inspiration for the story as a page from Greek history: the Battle of Cunaxa in 401 B.C. in which an army of soldiers, stranded in enemy territory, attempted to evade the Persian Army and make it back to their coastal home. The Warriors’ modern day updating of the story has the eponymous gang attempting to flee the City and return to their Coney Island base, after being set up to take the rap for the assassination of a gang leader.

With an all New York cast and crew, combining professional actors with kids recruited from the City’s districts and supported by real gang advisors, Hill’s tense, action packed movie uses the interconnecting lines of the New York subway map to track The Warriors as they attempt to ‘escape from New York’. And yes the movie does anticipate John Carpenter’s film of the same name from a couple of years later, but it also borrows from 1970s conspiracy thrillers, Blaxploitation movies and, in the stylised battle scenes, Kurosawa’s samurai films.

The use of a largely black and Hispanic cast caused the movie’s funders to question the film’s commerciality, leading to the production team re-editing the film, adding extra soundtrack elements to create a less realistic, more upbeat feel to the final movie. But there’s no doubting the realism of the environments in which shooting took place, even accepting some of the more over the top elements of the look of the factions, such as the Kiss style make up of the ‘Baseball Furies.’ One story goes that while filming on location in Coney Island the actors playing The Warriors had to remove any trace of their gang identities (achieved through some great embroidery by Brit Rose Clements, who also designed stage outfits for Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton) while at lunch so as not to draw undue attention from the real gangs in the area.

The film’s cinema release proved popular, but a series of tragic gang related shooting and stabbing incidents at screenings in the US nearly saw an end to The Warriors’ distribution life. As a result, Paramount allowed cinema chains the option to cancel future screenings: many took up the offer, and the film lay dormant until its second wind saw the movie released to the (then new) home viewing market, subsequently spawning a comic strip and video game spinoffs.

Tokyo Ghoul (Japan 2017: Dir Kentarô Hagiwara)

The arrival of Tokyo Ghoul, based on the incredibly popular manga of the same name, comes at the end of a six year success story for the franchise. Originally appearing in serial form in the 'Weekly Young Jump' magazine back in 2011, there have been on line spinoffs and TV adaptations, and while the world waits for a planned anime feature of the sequel Tokyo Ghoul:re, we now have a live action version of the original story. Whew!

Director Kentarô Hagiwara, whose directing CV previously comprised shorts and TV work, has the unenviable and not inconsiderable task of taming the multi tentacled beast (pun intended) that is the 'Tokyo Ghoul' franchise, and condensing it to a mere two hours (similar to Adam Wingard's only partly successful movie adaptation of the Death Note manga last year), while aiming to satisfy both established TG fans and those new to the franchise. Like me.

And I'm pleased to write that he's pulled it off: Tokyo Ghoul is that rare thing, an action film with a profound emotional heart. Masataka Kubota plays Ken Kaneki, a bookish student living in Tokyo, a city whose inhabitants are a mix of humans and ghouls (a form of vampire) living side by side. The ghouls are indistinguishable from their human neighbours until their lust for blood and flesh transforms them into something more nasty (including wings and tentacles, named kagune); ghoul murders are monitored, and the culprits obsessively tracked down by the Commission of Counter Ghoul (sic). Kaneki remains oblivious to the ghoul threat, until he is savagely bitten and stabbed by Rize - a seemingly sweet girl who is in fact 'one of them'. His life is only saved by a combination of falling masonry which lands on the murderous Rize, killing her, and valiant doctors who are able to operate on him by replacing some of his organs. The problem is that the organs previously belonged to newly dead Rize; the result being that Kaneki becomes the first human/ghoul hybrid.

Much of the film is devoted to Kaneki's battle with the rising ghoul within him. This has been done on screen many times before of course, but Kubota's performance here is quite heartbreaking, which I wasn't expecting. Scenes of him attempting, and failing, to remain human by eating 'normal' food are incredibly affecting (assisted by genre favourite Don Davis's stirring score). His adoption by Mr Yoshimura - owner of a ghoul friendly cafe who sources the menu from bodies reclaimed from a nearby suicide forest - is touching but merely adds to his dilemma. Rejected for his lack of ghoul purity by cafe worker Tôka (Fumika Shimizu, excellent) who also struggles to reconcile her outer 'normality' with her inner ghoul, he is literally stuck between two worlds. But with the death of a close friend he is forced to choose a side, and fully embrace the ghoul within him.

Tokyo Ghoul's last half hour sets up more traditional superhero antics - the battling ghouls even have masks - but they are well staged and the time taken by director Hagiwara to establish the characters means that the pyrotechnics have context. This isn't an empty franchise movie of the kind currently clogging up the multiplexes - it's a nuanced film, bringing fresh life to admittedly rather hackneyed themes of alienation and otherness, sensitively scripted by Sui Ishida, adapting his own comics. True, for a TG novice like me there were a few plot elements which confused rather than illuminated, but I look forward to future instalments which will hopefully clarify the story further. Or maybe I should just read the comics? Anyway, go see.

Jeepers Creepers 3 (USA 2017: Dir Victor Salva)

I'm not entirely sure I should be writing this. There's an active boycott of Jeepers Creepers 3 by some sections of the film-going community on the basis of the past crimes of its writer/director Victor Salva, and those sections have some pretty harsh words for anyone who crosses the cinematic picket line. Too late, I was one of those 'scabs.'

Few people with an interest in the horror movie will be unaware that Salva was tried and convicted in 1988 after pleading guilty to sexual conduct with one of the 12 year old actors in his film Clownhouse. Salva served 15 months of his three year prison sentence and was paroled in 1992. But the crime didn't stop Salva continuing to make his way in Hollyweird. Jeepers Creepers 1 and 2 were released in 2001 and 2003 respectively, and before those films he got picked up by Disney for the successful 1995 movie Powder (and against which a boycott was organised by the director's victim).

Supposedly talks for a third JC sequel were happening before 2 hit the cinemas, but various obstacles stopped the movie being green lit prior to 2015, when it ran into further problems after The Union of British Columbia Performers (it was due to be shot in Canada) warned prospective cast members away from the production because of Salva's past.

Jeepers Creepers 3 finally saw limited theatrical light of day in September 2017 after filming began and was completed earlier that year, the location having shifted from Canada to Louisiana. It limped out in this country straight to DVD with very little fanfare, dragging its rather shameful tail behind it. So, having set out the reasons for not giving it a go, what's it actually like?

Terrible. JC3 takes places roughly between the end of the first film and the start of the second, but there's no attempt at continuity or logic beyond these broadly linked events (and if you haven't seen 1 and 2 the movie will seem even more pointless). The Creeper, who seems to have morphed from his rather shadowy beginnings in the first installment to a kind of full on masked baddie, spends most of his time travelling around the countryside in his pimped up truck; think a tooled up James Bond car, but with various ludicrous accoutrements that allow him to pick off his victims from a distance.

There's a severed Creeper hand which seems to possess those who touch it (including a noticeably older 1980s regular Meg Foster, her no-spring-chickenness possibly the biggest shock in the film, even under the old age makeup), a subplot which almost unbelievably hints at abuse between a father and daughter, and enough shonky CGI moments to set your teeth on edge.

Because of the very short shooting schedule, my guess is that this was filmed based on a very loose script and almost entirely put together in the editing suite. While a couple of scenes hint at some of the inventiveness of the earlier films (mainly those of The Creeper in flight) this is a painful, desultory experience. And the closing sequence, featuring an actor from JC1 introduced to offer the possibility of a sequel, is a total red herring as the director had already made it very clear that JC3 was to be the final part.

Never say never, you my be thinking. Well I'll say it for you. Never.

The Station Agent (USA 2003: Dir Tom McCarthy)

Here's another of the viewing notes from one of the south London FEAST Film Nights screenings (from 2015, hence slight out of datedness).

Finbar McBride is a lonely soul, a dwarf, gently obsessed by trains, who with his friend Henry runs a model shop in Hoboken, New Jersey. When Henry unexpectedly dies, Finbar learns that he has been bequeathed a small abandoned train station building deep in the country. With nothing left for him in Hoboken, the grieving Finbar ups sticks and moves into the rundown and rather pokey railway hut, building a fragile friendship with a variety of characters: happy go lucky Joe who runs an ice cream van, standing in for his ill father; painter Olivia, who has a sorrow of her own; a young girl called Cleo; and Emily the librarian.

The Station Agent was the first film from director and writer Tom McCarthy (who also produces and acts, the show-off). McCarthy is now more famously known for his latest movie, the riveting and powerful Spotlight (2015), which among other accolades won him ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’ Oscars at the last Academy Awards. It’s tempting to make comparisons between both films – small people against the big bad world, if that doesn’t sound too trite – but in reality The Station Agent is very much a first film, unsure and hesitant, full of uncertain characters mired in their own worlds. This, by the way, is a good thing.

Peter Dinklage, with his sonorous voice and expressive eyes, is now a household name courtesy of the massively popular Game of Thrones TV series. But when The Station Agent was released the film gave the largely unknown actor his first major role. He is absolutely exceptional in this movie. Director of Photography Oliver Bokelberg’s camera spends a lot of time looking at him, as do we the audience. We’re invited to stare at and then move on from Dinklage’s dwarfism. This is because unlike many of the cast’s reactions to his size – shock, screaming, ignoring, staring and in one case taking a photograph – we also spend a lot of time in his company, and understand him first as a human being and second (or maybe third) as a person of small stature. What we never understand is his back story, which contrasts with the lives of Joe and Olivia, who feel comfortable confiding their troubles to Finbar. McBride in truth never invites these confessions – he just wants to live his life and indulge his obsession with trains, ambling among the discarded rolling stock of the New Jersey countryside – and the human cost of any personal interaction is clearly and brilliantly etched on his face.

In a 2003 interview McCarthy drew comparisons between casting a dwarf in a lead role with that of doing the same with a black actor thirty years previously. “Putting the financing together for The Station Agent you had people saying, 'Think about this, people aren't ready to watch a dwarf in the lead role of a movie'. I'd be like 'How do you know that?' A lot of the time I'd be talking to people about the film and, almost as an aside they'd say to me 'I have to say, he's very sexy'. You know, if it was George Clooney, they wouldn't be whispering that to me, they'd just come out and say it. It is almost taboo.”

Lies We Tell (UK 2017: Dir Mitu Misra)

Any film that starts off with Harvey Keitel being driven around the streets of Bradford and ends up with Gabriel Byrne facing off a mad dog must have something going for it, right?

And Lies We Tell does have a lot going for it. Ish.

Gabriel Byrne is Donald, world weary driver to shady boss Demi (Keitel). When Demi dies suddenly, his last request is for Donald to visit his home and clear away any traces of Demi's extra marital relationship with a Pakistani girl called Amber (who by day is a trainee lawyer), including an intimate video of them together. Mid clearout, Amber turns up at the house, and an uneasy friendship between the two develops. Amber has been seeing Demi as a way of obtaining money for her legal education, and to free herself from her family, ruled by the vicious and calculating KD, who has links to the Bradford underworld. Amber and KD, who are cousins, were once 'married' on paper to appease the family but agreed not to consummate the relationship, except that KD changed his mind. But any control that Amber has on KD's behaviour vanishes when he turns his attentions to Amber's 16 year old sister Miriam. And Amber has other problems, namely that copies of the incriminating video are still floating around, potentially jeopardising her burgeoning legal career.

Gabriel Byrne and Harvey Keitel in Lies We Tell

Donald's constantly perplexed gaze, as he tries to assist Amber in her plight to extricate herself from Demi's life and do right by her family, is one likely to be shared by an audience not previously exposed to the harsher side of life in a Northern city. Bradford, where the film is located, has been used as the setting for other 'gritty' films like Room at the Top (1959) and Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987). But this is arguably the first time that the experience of a working class Muslim family and indeed the sub culture of young minority ethnic groups has been depicted in this way. Director Mitu Misra shows us the highs and lows of a society normally either pilloried or ignored by the media, and it is to his credit that he doesn't sweeten the pill. Credit should also be given to Sibylla Deen, who as Amber shows the right combination of grit and uncertainty (and as an Australian does a pretty convincing Bradford accent).

On the downside Lies We Tell does have a lot of inconsistencies. Bryne seems rather lost in the role of Donald, unsure of his motivation from scene to scene (he just looks tired). And Mark Addy, who plays Donald's friend Billy, looks like he was slated for a much larger part which may have been trimmed during editing - there are scenes between Billy, Donald and Amber that are played out without context.

Gabriel Byrne at the end of his tether in Lies We Tell

For a first film Misra has also crammed in too many elements - to make them work needed a steadier and more accomplished hand. Apart from the family entanglements in this country there's a land dispute which is touched on but never fully explored. There's also some schemes of mysticism among the Muslim citizens which doesn't help the film defend itself from claims of racism. And the thriller and domestic themes never really gel together. I wondered whether Misra may have been better off simply telling the story of a Muslim family in Bradford, and the tensions with an older daughter who wishes to break out of the household and start a career as a lawyer. It's one that hasn't really been told before, and arguably didn't need the expositional criminal trimmings.

But while the strands of this film don't all quite hold together, there are some good set pieces, and the vibrant photography of the streets (and clubs) of Bradford contrast well with scenes shot against the city's backdrop of imposing buildings and immaculate formal gardens. This is after all a film about Bradford, so it's perhaps right that Lies We Tell's contrasts are as diverse as the city itself.

The Darjeeling Limited (USA 2007: Dir Wes Anderson)

Another of my FEAST Film Nights viewing notes.

For those unfamiliar with the idiosyncratic films of Wes Anderson, The Darjeeling Limited is as good a place to start as any – his movies all share a unique vision, mixing the mundane with the bizarre, featuring odd characters in odd situations in even odder landscapes – and once you’ve seen one, you’ll immediately recognise his work. Confusingly, one should start before The Darjeeling Limited with a short prologue to the movie, Hotel Chevalier, which may or may not be showing tonight: don’t worry if it isn’t, I’m just being pedantic.

The story of The Darjeeling Limited centres on three brothers - Jack, the youngest, the bandaged and bruised (and very bossy) Francis, and clothing kleptomaniac Peter - who re-unite following the accidental death of their father a year previously, and decide to take a spiritual journey across India by train, hoping to reconnect with each other. That the brothers are a fairly dysfunctional bunch, made worse by their states of mourning, means that their plans, originally carefully planned by Francis and monitored by his seen but not often heard accomplice Brendan, fall apart quite spectacularly. But when they’re thrown off the train on which they’ve been travelling they are properly introduced to a country outside of their sphere of experience, a country which is now home to the reason for their trip.

The Darjeeling Limited is not a film obsessed with plot – it is instead a quirky, ruminative and free-wheeling study of three men caught up in their own depression, struggling to hold themselves together as a family, as well as finding out what ‘family’ means. It’s also a lot of fun, with the brothers bumbling along, sometimes strung out on Indian prescription drugs, constantly bickering while trying to makes sense of their own grief and the country they find themselves in. Anderson isn’t afraid to take us to some dark places, but the combination of humour, occasional slapstick and pathos is delicately balanced, recalling at times the silent comedies of Buster Keaton with added mysticism.

But the real star is India itself. Anderson’s regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman perfectly captures the majestic sweep of the country, and his colour palette is hugely effective whether it’s depicting the glow of sunset or the garish colours of The Darjeeling Limited, the train on which the brothers travel.

There are layers of symbolism in The Darjeeling Limited which have been endlessly pondered over by fans and critics in the same way that the films of the Coen Brothers are carefully dissected. What do the feathers mean? Who is the Bill Murray character? What’s a tiger doing on a train? Who knows? Just enjoy it.

The French Connection (USA 1971: Dir William Friedkin)

Continuing my viewing notes for the FEAST Film Nights evenings, these were my musings on The French Connection:

Towards the end of the 1960s major Hollywood studios started worrying that they might be out of touch with younger viewing audiences, and began hiring ‘risky’ directors like Arthur Penn (The Chase (1966), Bonnie and Clyde (1967)), Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch (1969)) and Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider (1969)) to breathe new life into depictions of America at the cinema. But despite the advances made by these movies, the concept of The French Connection – where drugs are rife in the city and New York cops are almost indistinguishable from the bad guys - was deemed too amoral, and was turned down by nearly every major studio before finally getting the green light from 20th Century Fox. 

The French Connection is an adaptation of Robin Moore’s 1969 book of the same name, which told the true story of NYPD detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, who broke up a notorious New York drug operation and confiscated thirty-two million pounds worth of heroin. Egan and Grosso served as technical advisors on the movie, incorporating their own phrasing into Ernest Tidyman’s script - their film counterparts Gene Hackman (who was not the director’s first choice – Friedkin originally wanted Jackie Gleason) and Roy Scheider spent a month patrolling with Egan so they could get closer to the characters they were portraying. It’s probably best known for having one of the tensest car chases in the history of film, but The French Connection is so much more than that – both an intense character study and essay on the price of corruption.

In a 2015 interview with the film’s director, William Friedkin, he reflected on the making of the film: “We were mostly influenced by the European films of the 1960s. The French new wave; Italian neo-realism; Kurosawa and other Japanese filmmakers. We were inspired by them and not bound to any formula. The French Connection, for all its success, was a real departure for a cop film, which was why it took us two years to get it made.”

“The chase scene was never in (the) script. I created that…with the producer Philip D’Antoni…we walked out of my apartment, headed south in Manhattan and we kept walking until we came up with that chase scene, letting the atmosphere of the city guide us. The steam coming off the street, and sound of the subway rumbling beneath our feet - the treacherous traffic on crowded streets. Nobody ever asked to see a script. We went three hundred thousand over (the) million and a half dollar budget, and they (the studio) wanted to kill me every day for that.”

Friedkin hasn’t always been the most reliable of documenters of his own films, and probably the greatest thing about The French Connection is that, while he makes it sound like it was made up as he went along, it’s actually a meticulously plotted movie without a wasted shot, which played its own part in changing the future of film.

New Films Round Up #12 - Reviews of Watch Over Us (USA 2017), The Ice Cream Truck (USA 2017), Consumption (USA 2016), Jonah Lives (USA 2015), Peelers (USA 2016) and The Id (USA 2015)

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Themroc (France 1973: Dir Claude Faraldo)

Continuing my series of viewing notes of films screened at West Norwood FEAST Film Nights over the last few years, here's some thoughts on Themroc.

This year (2015) the French Canadian director Jean Marc-Vallée made Demolition, a Hollywood movie featuring a tortured soul who starts to dismantle appliances and later buildings to work through his emotional crises. 43 years ago the French director Claude Faraldo directed Themroc, a movie where a tortured soul has a bad day at work, comes home, turns his entire front room into a cave, shacks up with his sister and eats a policeman. Two films, two building sites. Come on, which one would you rather see?

Themroc is a dark but hugely funny howl of rage against oppression, the strictures of work and everything that prevents man from being primal and free. Made five years after the Paris riots of 1968, there’s more than a whiff of anarchy and Situationist politics in the air as we follow Themroc: preparing for and on his journey to work; his sacking (because he witnessed his boss and secretary fooling around); and his subsequent orgy of destruction after he returns to his flat, grabs his just-clothed sister and walls up the living room door, before creating a cave mouth where the back wall used to be.

I’ve seen this film a number of times over the years. My first viewing, as a teenager, admittedly left me rather cold – it seemed that director Faraldo just wanted to shock with his scenes of incest and cannibalism – don’t worry, you’re spared most of the detail. But watching it some years later, and again recently - with the benefit of at least one mid-life crisis behind me - I appreciated not only Michel Piccoli’s superhuman performance (literally – watch for the scenes where he takes a loaded wheelbarrow upstairs and moves a car with his bare hands) but also a brilliantly nuanced one. 

Communicating without language - his vocabulary consisting of a series of increasingly guttural snarls, howls and grunts (his fellow actors just speak gibberish, save for a few words of French) - Themroc is a bewildered stranger in his own broken part of France, trying to make sense of his own feelings and escape his dull existence.

Praise also for the supporting cast: Jeanne Heviale, who plays Themroc’s mother, is excellent, her face portraying a constant mask of disappointment whatever her son does, whether being late for work or throwing the best cutlery out of his newly formed cave mouth.  Also Beatrice Romand as his sister, who turns in an extraordinarily sensual performance amid the distinctly un-erotic ruins of Themroc’s flat. 

Themroc is a film which in its own desire not to be taken seriously becomes the perfect vehicle for the Situationist concept of non-competitive play being the one thing that is truly liberating for the self. Themroc’s cave and actions are the inverse of the walled in flat-dwellers around him, and he emerges as the hero of the piece despite his apparent madness: he’s a tenement - and rather pervy - King Lear.

Performance (UK 1970 Dir Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg)

At the start of 2018 I thought I'd reproduce some viewing notes that I wrote for screenings at my
local film club over the past couple of years, kicking off with Performance. 

Performance is a movie thoroughly deserving of that rather over-used term ‘cult status.’ Filmed in 1968, it was shelved for two years before finally being released – with cuts – to a public unused to such transgressive goings-on in a British flick, and greeting it with little more than mild disinterest. Two decades of frequent showings on the club circuits built up a steady fan base, leading to the film now regularly being included in ‘20 top British film’ lists. Whether it deserves that accolade is a matter for debate, but its enduring fascination is more than nostalgia for a London of the past – it was one of the first films, British or otherwise, to explicitly flirt with gender identity and its blurred boundaries. Filled with druggy details and a certain soupcon of polymorphous perversity, it’s a movie the UK certainly wasn’t ready for in 1970.

The question of identity extends beyond the story of the film, which sees heavy for hire Chas (played by James Fox) on the run from a killing, moving himself into, and ‘turning on’ at the Notting Hill home of ‘retired’ rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) and his two muses, played by Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton.   

The distinction between real life and film was blurred in the casting - Jagger and Pallenberg may possibly have been an item at the point of filming, and the latter had already been associated with other members of The Rolling Stones. James Fox was at the time going out with an androgynous girl called Andee, who is suspiciously similar to the slight Ms Breton, with whom Chas has a relationship. Jagger’s former girlfriend Marianne Faithfull goes further in the ‘art imitating life’ debate, citing  a wild druggy evening with Jagger, James Fox and Andee as the inspiration for part of the film, a detail picked up by Donald Cammell and expanded into a full length movie script, originally titled ‘The Liars’. 

And one cannot forget the spectre of Brian Jones, the Stones member who, very like Turner in the film, had rejected his band and opted for a life of drug-fuelled self-reflection. As Bill Wyman said, again echoing the Turner character, “he was very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it – highly intelligent – and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away.” Tragically Jones would die between the filming of Performance and its cinema release.

People often cite Performance as Nic Roeg’s first directing role, which it was, but it was also co-helmed by Donald Cammell. Cammell came from a wealthy background, which funded his travels around the world, freely indulging his talent as an artist and moving in the circles of the great and the good. In 1967 he ended up in Paris, where via producer Sanford Lieberson he was paired with Nicolas Roeg, a jobbing cinematographer, to produce the final flick – rumour has it that Marlon Brando, a friend of Cammell’s, was first approached for the James Fox role. And although it’s what would now be seen as a typically Roeg film – all sharp edits and strange point of view shooting  - there is a question about how much of Performance’s look and louche transgressive feel actually came from Cammell’s first-hand experience of the excesses of the ‘swinging sixties.’