Mick Jagger puts on quite a show in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s trippy PERFORMANCE
PERFORMANCE (Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, June 3, 8:00
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
A British gangster on the run hides out with a psychedelic rock star in this strangely enticing film from Donald (The Demon Seed) Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (making his big-screen directorial debut). James Fox didn’t know what he was getting into when he signed on to play Chas, a mobster who finds sanctuary with mushroom-popping rock-diva has-been Turner, played with panache by Mick Jagger. Throw in Anita Pallenberg, a fab drug trip, and the great “Memo to Turner” scene and you have a film that some consider the real precursor to MTV, some think a work of pure demented genius, and others find to be one of the most pretentious and awful pieces of claptrap ever committed to celluloid. We fall somewhere in the middle of all of that. Performance is screening in a 35mm print June 3 at 8:00 as part of the IFC Center series “Queer/Art/Film” and will be followed by a discussion with artist, writer, documentarian, and activist Gregg Bordowitz. The monthly series, which consists of films selected by gay New York City artists, continues July 22 with Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night, chosen by Amadéus Leopold, and August 19 with Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette, picked by Chitra Ganesh.