Plot
Chas (James Fox) is a soldier in an East London gang led by Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon); his speciality is intimidation through violence as he collects pay-offs for Flowers. He is very good at his job, and has a reputation for liking it. His sexual liaisons are casual and rough. When Flowers decides to take over a betting shop, owned by Joey Maddocks (Anthony Valentine), he forbids Chas to get involved, as he feels Chas's complicated personal history with Maddocks may lead to trouble. Chas is angry about this and later humiliates Maddocks, who retaliates by wrecking Chas's apartment and attacking Chas himself. Chas shoots him, packs a suitcase and runs from the scene. When Flowers makes it clear that he has no intention of offering protection to Chas but instead wants him eliminated, Chas decides to head for the countryside to hide, but instead winds up hiding out in London, requesting a trusted friend help him get out of the country.
He assumes a new name, Johnny Dean, appears at the house of Turner (Mick Jagger), ingratiates himself with Pherber (Anita Pallenberg), one of the female inhabitants, and moves in. Turner is a reclusive, eccentric former rock star who has "lost his demon" and who lives there with his female friends Pherber and Lucy (Michele Breton), with whom he enjoys a non-possessive and bi-sexual ménage à trois. At first, Chas is contemptuous of Turner and Turner attempts to return the rent paid in advance but they start influencing each other. Chas also enjoys intimate moments with Pherber during which he shows his homophobic tendencies. Pherber and Turner understand his conflict and want to understand what makes him function so well within his world. To speed up the process they make him take hallucinogenic drugs (Amanita muscaria). After that evening Chas opens up. He begins a caring relationship with Lucy, implying that he outgrew the psychological boundaries he was stuck in due to having to function as a stereotypically masculine man within a gangster world.
Subsequently, at the end of the film, Turner is shot by Chas and Pherber is last seen hiding in a cupboard. Chas seems to agree to be 'welcomed back' to his former boss Harry Flowers by Rosie (Stanley Meadows), another Flowers thug; we understand that they are going to kill him. As the car drives off, the face we see through the window is ambiguous – it could be Chas or it could be Turner.
Read more about this topic: Performance (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)