Performance

Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet... Donald Cammell? The Borgesian hall of mirrors is lit as a squalid Persona travesty, filled with an extraordinary allusive panoply of explosions, implosions, and metamorphoses. A bad boy, "an out-of-date boy," the London torpedo (James Fox) enforces for the racketeering pederast (Johnny Shannon) and thoroughly enjoys his job. (Slugging debtors, demolishing shops and pouring acid on limos are all in a day's work.) The underworld merger has no use for private vendettas, on the lam the thug finds refuge in a Notting Hill den masquerading as a traveling juggler: "I need a bohemian atmosphere." The witchy groupie (Anita Pallenberg) greets him bare under a soiled fur coat, though the presiding magus is Mick Jagger's slumming pop meteor, introduced in bed with the androgynous French kitty (Michèle Breton). The accelerating gangland flurries of the beginning give way to the languid psychedelia of the rock star's hideout, where image and identity dissolve into a blur of wigs, strobe lights, superimpositions. "A world of their own, these kids." Nicolas Roeg provides the grubby luminosity, Cammell the opium liquidity—auteurs joined by their sense of transfiguration, the limits of liberation, the elastic grotesqueries of being human. "I know who I am" is the anxious refrain, macho violence and pansexual insinuation are the performance modes leaking into one another. Bad mushrooms for the doors of perception, Les Enfants Terribles, a Bacon pile of flabby nude mobsters at the end of "Memo From Turner." The mating of bullet and brain literalizes the penetration promised between the two men, "we just dismantled you a bit, that's all." If Losey in The Servant surveyed the meld as Old England's strictures deforming themselves, Cammell and Roeg locate the malefic side of new freedoms and salute the man who loses his mind but finds his demon. ("A nutcase. Like all artists.") Bertolucci's study in The Dreamers comes along in due time. With Anthony Valentine, Kenneth Colley, Allan Cuthbertson, John Bindon, Anthony Morton, and Laraine Wickens.