Watching: Performance
Jul. 7th, 2019 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartThe Picturehouse has a regular vintage film slot on Sunday afternoons, and this week's was Nicolas Roeg's directorial debut, Performance, which T was keen to see. I was a bit more dubious, mostly because it was an 18 and I generally find 18 films have too much graphic violence, sex or both for my tastes, but went along anyway.
The vintage showings are often quite full, and as this was unreserved seating we went in early to make sure of getting good seats. When we were still the only people in the cinema two minutes before the film was due to start we decided this had probably been an unnecessary precaution; in fact, apart from us there was only one person in the cinema. I did almost leave about halfway through, when, after about 40 minutes of frequent and fairly graphic (well, too graphic for me) violence the film moved on to a sex scene, but I stayed and it actually got better after that; the first half was fairly standard if artistically filmed gangster film, but the second half set the toxic masculinity of James Fox's East End gangster against the sexual and gender fluidity of Mick Jagger's Mr Turner and his household in an interesting and sometimes surprisingly modern way.
I'm not sure I'd say I quite enjoyed it, but it was interesting, even if very definitely the kind of 1960s film where you can't help suspecting that everyone involved was on far too many drugs. I was also fascinated by the strength of the resemblance between Fox in the late 1960s and his son Laurence now, which extends beyond the clear facial similarity to a very similar physique and way of moving.
The vintage showings are often quite full, and as this was unreserved seating we went in early to make sure of getting good seats. When we were still the only people in the cinema two minutes before the film was due to start we decided this had probably been an unnecessary precaution; in fact, apart from us there was only one person in the cinema. I did almost leave about halfway through, when, after about 40 minutes of frequent and fairly graphic (well, too graphic for me) violence the film moved on to a sex scene, but I stayed and it actually got better after that; the first half was fairly standard if artistically filmed gangster film, but the second half set the toxic masculinity of James Fox's East End gangster against the sexual and gender fluidity of Mick Jagger's Mr Turner and his household in an interesting and sometimes surprisingly modern way.
I'm not sure I'd say I quite enjoyed it, but it was interesting, even if very definitely the kind of 1960s film where you can't help suspecting that everyone involved was on far too many drugs. I was also fascinated by the strength of the resemblance between Fox in the late 1960s and his son Laurence now, which extends beyond the clear facial similarity to a very similar physique and way of moving.
