THE BEAST THROUGH TIME

The thing about cult films is that they tend to have their own unique vibe and energy—something that sets them apart from other releases, contemporary or otherwise. Cammell and Roeg’s Performance (1970) is certainly a notable example of this phenomenon: alienating, groundbreaking, and, at times, awkwardly pretentious. Looking back at it now, it’s definitely an acquired taste. It exists in its own twilight zone of madness, where the counterculture of the ’60s was seemingly granted one final Dionysian blowout before the confused malaise of the ’70s altered the cultural landscape irrevocably. Then again, it also seems to lay the groundwork for the identity-swapping trajectory of Bowie’s career with his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust.

In some ways, I see Performance as a cinematic equivalent of John Fowles’s novel The Magus, in which an outsider figure is drawn into a world alien to everything he’s previously known. For the coolly repressed gangster Chas (James Fox), see the emotionally distant intellectual Nicholas; and for Turner’s labyrinthine, drug-fueled townhouse in Notting Hill, London, see Conchis’s secluded villa on the fictional Greek island of Phraxos (Spetses). Both men undergo seismic transformations during their time in these exotic, hidden-away spaces, as their perceptions of reality are irrevocably altered by the mysterious figures who catalyse their internal shifts (and, in Chas’s case, external ones too—his physical appearance changes significantly by the end of the film).

Echoes of Francis Bacon’s art also permeate much of Performance, which makes sense, given that director Donald Cammell was a notable painter himself and a great admirer of Bacon—particularly his uneasy merging of high art with low-end society, including connections to the notorious Kray brothers. The artist as gangster—or the blending of art and criminality—is a key theme in Performance, with Chas ultimately finding himself able to shed his criminal persona in favour of something more abstract. His role as a gangster is revealed to be just as much a fluid construct as an artist’s philosophy or identity.

Thirty years after Performance, another cult film—Sexy Beast—expertly managed to distinguish itself from the pack of Guy Ritchie gangster films and their many imitators. In many ways, it served as a spiritual successor to Cammell and Roeg’s film, even employing some effective fast-cutting and non-linear editing (a Cammell contribution to British cinema history) reminiscent of its 1970 predecessor. James Fox also appears in Sexy Beast, playing Harry—an upper-class associate of the criminal underworld—which contrasts intriguingly with his earlier portrayal of the working-class Chas in Performance.

Though free of Performance’s psychedelia, Sexy Beast shares a similar theme: a man trying to escape the world he once inhabited. Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) is a retired safecracker living in exile on the Spanish coast, whose idyllic life is disrupted when his past comes marching back in the form of the volatile Don Logan (Ben Kingsley). Though Gal believes he's found his personal Shangri-La in Almería, we sense right from the start that trouble is brewing in paradise—that something ominous is on the horizon. This is most strikingly symbolised by the surreal moment when a giant boulder rolls down a nearby hillside and crashes into Gal’s swimming pool. Being dragged back to England (at Don's psychotic insistence) for one last job sends Gal on a reverse journey to Chas’s in Performance—not toward transformation, but toward a confrontation with who he used to be. The difference is that the 'new' Gal is just about secure enough in himself to return to Spain (and his beloved Deedee) intact, even though the descent into the old underworld nearly drowns him—both metaphorically and literally.

What I truly appreciate about these two cult films in their respective moments is that they exude confidence and a "don't give a fuck" swagger, existing in their own universe—unattached to much of what came before and untroubled by what would come after, much like the boulder that craters the tiles of Gal's swimming pool.

Proper gangster.