I just perform...

I'm off to catch a bit of late-summer sun, after the coldest and most understated English summer for a long time. Before going, though, I knew it was time for my annual viewing of 'Performance', a film which has thrilled and horrified me simultaneously for many a year now.

Only a sadist nutter like Lars Von Trier would bother trying to commit such a psychological bear pit to celluloid these days, and my guess is that with all his smirking knowingness, he'd ultimately fail to scrape the depths of disturbance  that this forty - forty! - year old flawed masterpiece would achieve. You can almost smell the singed afghans and burning patchouli oil, as the flower children committed suttee on the pyre of 1960s idealism that this film effectively became, with Mick Jagger - by all accounts the only member of cast or crew to emerge relatively unscathed (apart from a Dolly Gip operator who retrained as a vet and lives happily in Cheam) - sneering down on them all like a diabolical Bonfire Night Guy.

I'm sure everyone knows the plot, such as it is - gangster (James Fox) on the run takes refuge in the house of a half-crazy former rock star and his ménage of ladies (Anita Pallenberg, with her big generous Northern European body and her drawling junkie drivel, reminds me of every woman I've ever known who's hung around with rock stars) and a jailbait French waif (the seemingly vanished Michelle Breton, who seems to have been freely used and abused by passing members of the production team before being abandoned in Paris by co-director Donald Cammell, who would go on to take his own life (indeed, Keith Richards, whose ire was famously raised by the cavortings of his lady Anita and his Best Buddy Mick, sourly observed that Performance was "the best thing Donald Cammell ever did, apart from kill himself.")).

Fox and Jagger are both washed up, jaded and morally spent, and over the course of the film, aided by Anita's Special Mushroom Omelette and a load of nude wriggling, their characters collide and merge. The dénouement is predictable and surprising in equal measure, and it's a hell of a ride to get there. My own fascination with this film is, I'm sure, not entirely healthy and quite voyeuristic;  always too canny or scared to delve very far into psychedelics (barring a couple of mushroom trips which were wonderful but left me feeling disinclined to push my luck), I suppose I'm left with a small residual curiosity about what it must be like to turn your own psyche inside out, and watching this film brings me as close as I'd probably want to get, now. Anyway, it never disappoints me, and will always remind me (as though I needed it) of why I will always be a Stones girl and never a Beatles girl. Imagine John Lennon having a go at Jagger's role, and managing to inject it with anything more that his trademark snide contempt. Jagger might well have been a comical little geezer, but he was the only one for this part.

And speaking of mind games (as I was, sort of), I found myself following an electronic trail to a curious little indie film called 'Ticket to Heaven', which though I only finished watching it an hour ago, has already vanished from YouTube* (as I was told it often does... pricks up ears after hearing imaginary knock on front door and anticipates 'courtesy call' but a pair of weirdly-smiling psychos from 'the organisation'...). It's a 1981 low-budget Canadian piece about an amiable bloke in his late twenties, David, who, finding himself at a bit of a professional and personal hiatus, takes a trip out to California to clear his head a bit and spend some time with an old friend who's settled out there.

Only, as we quickly find out, his mate has joined a cult (not actually called The Moonies, though they have a South East Asian leader who turns out to have a nifty eye for real estate and gold-plated crockery). And his mate has been sent, along with some pulchritudinous female companions (a eye-bulgingly perky pre-fame Kim Cattrall) to ease his passage into the Light. There are no great surprises in the linear plot of cult engagement and (possible?) disengagement, but what keeps you hooked are the depictions of psychological manipulation and deconstruction used to break down and 'convert' the most cynical novice. Lack of sleep, physical overstimulation, protein-free diet, relentless physical overstimulation, endless repetition and insidious infantilising will, in the 'correct' proportions, induce psychological and emotional helplessness in all but the most rigid (or well-trained) human being, and of course it's only a matter of time before malleable David is getting down to the glassy-eyed chanting with The Gang. It's well-acted, understated stuff with an ambiguous ending (fantastic final frame), and worth 90 minutes of anyone's time if you're interested in how certain mass movements operate. For me it was especially poignant, as a kid I knew when I was 17 joined the Moonies and effectively vanished from the world for almost fifteen years, only to emerge a shattered and terrified individual who lived in such genuine fear of his life that his family moved with him to another continent. If you can find it, give it a go, but don't tell anyone I sent you.

And my last word - The Hurt Locker. A tense well-acted war film, but with a ludicrous central premise. They don't take the loosest cannon, the most vainglorious thrill-seeking, grandiose egomaniac, and put him in a job (in this case, bomb-disposal unit commander) where team work and keeping a cool head under immense pressure, are absolutely crucial. Believe me, they don't. The main character in this film undermined the entire enterprise.

Always nice to see Guy Pearce, though.

Right, I'm off to boost my Vitamin D and sort out the Greek economic crisis by buying lots of taramasalata. Don't nobody mess with my blog while I'm away. Yatsou!

*here's the link I used. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoavV7D74BU


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