Performance (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

 

Performance (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

Cast: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michèle Breton, Johnny Shannon, Anthony Valentine, Ann Sidney, John Bindon, Stanley Meadows, Allan Cuthbertson, Anthony Morton. Screenplay: Donald Cammell. Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg. Art direction: John Clark. Film editing: Anthony Gibbs, John Smedley-Aston. Music: Jack Nitzsche. 

I’m so used to seeing James Fox as a proper upperclass Brit in films like A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984) and The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993) that it took me a while to identify him with the kinky gangster Chas he plays in Performance. In fact, it’s a role that writer and co-director Donald Cammell intended for Marlon Brando. But Fox, with his veneer of handsome self-assuredness, fits the film perfectly as the foil for MIck Jagger’s sybaritic rock star, Turner. It’s a film about outlaws from two worlds, the criminal Chas and the artist Turner coming together on the artist’s turf. It’s also a kind of Götterdämmerung for the swinging ‘60s, made during the ‘60s but held from release until the selfish ‘70s by a squeamish studio, its sex and nudity edited out but restored, at least partially, later. It’s visually and narratively challenging, with time- and place-switching editing to the point that it still provokes exegesis. It launched co-director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s career, and it may have doomed Cammell’s. In short, it’s some kind of important film, but no one has ever been able to pin down exactly why. The very definition of a cult film.

Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000)

Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast

Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane, Amanda Redman, James Fox, Cavan Kendall, Julianne White, Álvaro Monje. Screenplay: Louis Mellis, David Scinto. Cinematography: Ivan Bird. Production design: Jan Houllevigue. Film editing: John Scott, Sam Sneade. Music: Roque Baños.

As paunchy, suntanned Gal Dove, a retired safecracker played by Ray Winstone, stands beside the swimming pool of his Spanish villa, a huge boulder comes crashing down the hillside behind him. But just as it seems about to flatten him, it takes a bounce and sails over his head to land in the pool. The incident is metaphorical for what's about to occur to Gal with the arrival of deranged motormouth Don Logan, played by Ben Kingsley in an Oscar-nominated performance. Don has been dispatched by crime boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane) to persuade Gal to participate in an elaborate heist back in London. Don is as deadly as the boulder, and like it, he too winds up in the pool, but not before doing a good deal of damage. Kingsley's hilariously sinister performance as the unhinged mobster is the most celebrated thing about Sexy Beast, but this decidedly eccentric spin on a film noir plot is also an invigorating reworking of the conventional heist movie. The heist itself, which involves breaking into an impregnable vault underwater, would have been the center of an ordinary movie, but here it's intercut with a flashback to what happened in the confrontation of Don with Gal and his wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman). Jonathan Glazer's work directing TV commercials and music videos is reflected in the film's occasional hyperactivity and elements of the surreal and bizarre, but he's also able to sustain moments of tension before and between eruptions of violent action.