Performance

Performance exceeded my expectations. It was extremely bizarre, provocative, and thoroughly entertaining. Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg were their magnetic selves. The hedonistic den that they inhabited in the film seemed a mirror image to the description Marianne Faithfull gives in her autobiography of Anita and Brian Jones' flat. A place for their crowd to drop in and a place where Anita and Brian passed their time engaging in black magic, drug use, dress-up, physical abuse, sex, music, and hanging out with friends (this was before Anita was with Keith Richards). These activities are featured prominently in the film as well. It's unbelievable to me that the film was released by Warner Brothers. The studio tried their best to bury it, but it found a way out somehow (two years later than it was supposed to be released and after an attempt at burning the negative).

Here's a really good quote (featured on the Film Streams notes) from co-director Donald Cammell:

"One of the reasons I think Warners hated the film so much is because it forces an audience to consider the construction of their own fragmented selves, the various aspects of sexuality, which is something people never question. Nick [Roeg, co-director] loves to tell the story of one Warner executive who observed, 'Even the bath water is dirty in this,' referring to the menage a trois in Turner's bath. Nick could only say, 'Well the water looks that way because they just took a bath!"

My sisters and I managed to keep a fairly straight face through all the absurdity, non-sequiturs, and random cut-up style (at times making it seem that the film was edited by a blind person), until a young girl appeared with a turban and mustache in silk pajamas serving tea to the bohemians and speaking in a munchkin voice. At that point we lost it. I can't remember the last time that I've been struck with uncontrollable laughter (I think it's only happened about 5 times total in my life), but this was a bad case of it. It took so much self-control to contain it. I forced myself to disengage, I looked around me, I tried to get angry, I put a sweatshirt over my face, I took a drink of water. I was literally shaking and sweating trying to contain my laughter and not totally disrupt the whole theater.

This self-control was tested each time the child (or possible midget?) appeared onscreen. The second time she showed up, Erin exploded with laughter (the kind that you can tell the person attempted to muffle unsuccessfully) and we were gone again. Miraculously, I was able to keep things under control for the next scene and a half she appeared, until she blurted "I'm sick of beans" in her old man/baby/nasal drawl as she angrily through a can of beans in the trash. That flipped the switch again. Luckily that was her last line. If her screen time totaled any more than about 6 minutes, we would have been kicked out of the theater.