Performance 4K 1970

The great director Pavel Ruminov once said in an interview that he tries to make sense of all the films he has seen and not understood, reducing it to the fact that the mistakes of the audience are more probable than the mediocrity of the creators of the same pictures.

And here I was, having sinned a lot, somehow remembered these golden words while watching 'Performance'. It's hard to turn off my cynical brain, which is addicted to various kinds of plot puzzles. Imagine being shown non-stop slides, visually disconnected but with a logical interconnection. What my brain tried to do first of all was to immediately build a true, existing in a single instance and belonging only to me, sequential chain of what was happening.

Naturally, at the thirtieth minute, even before the appearance of Mickey 'rubber sponges' Jagger, the same brain uttered a tragic: 'U-uh!' and, most likely, I would have pressed pause to come to my senses, but apparently - that was intended, and the action flowed more or less calm stream. Nicholas Roeg took advantage of this respite by not wasting any time. With his fantastic camera work, he brings me, along with Chaz, into the world of the underground, a watershed moment for rock music.

I love movies about rock musicians and with rock musicians. 'Performance' was a chance to see a hermaphrodite-like Mick Jagger, sometimes I confused him with his own girlfriend Lucy - a French girl-boy. For the second time, I'm convinced that Rogue is the best at filming erotic scenes - his camera goes straight into the flesh, and it didn't fuck up one bit.

I relaxed a bit and started to expect the denouement to take the same tone.... But the only thing my puny brain realized was that I needed to revisit 'Performance' urgently, not to fall in love, but to understand and perhaps to love. The fact that Rogue and Cammell have turned 'Performance' into a grand performance of cross-dressing and the ever-present theme of 'Who am I?' with the psychedelic flavor of fried mushrooms is an undeniable fact that is so explicitly and deliberately on the surface that it makes me question my own veracity.

And when I write about it, it seems to me that a passionate desire awakens in me - no! not to understand it, but to try to feel it, to experience it as poetry or music - to run headlong into the sea! And like a baby, I am learning everything all over again - to feel, to wonder, to love.