Plot

Alex (Anne Heche) is a loans officer in an international bank. She is saddled with an enormous mortgage and an unsympathetic and sleazy boss who threatens to sack her and cynically instructs her to sleep with her clients if that's what it takes to improve her falling business productivity. He also taunts her with her entrepreneur father's failure and bankruptcy. Alex in reckless desperation decides that if she is going to have to sell her body to pay off her debts then it might as well be for large amounts of cash and takes a job moonlighting as a high class hooker. It is in this capacity that she meets Bruno Buckingham (Walken) an international money launderer and engages in a session with him involving complex games of sex, money and power. Bruno's driver, Tony, (Steven Bauer) on being instructed to check out her background, breaks into her house and brutally rapes her before revealing that he is an undercover cop assigned to bringing Bruno down. He blackmails her into helping him in this endeavour.

The next day at the bank, Alex meets a new client Virginia Chow (Joan Chen) whom it transpires is the ex-wife and ongoing lover of Bruno. This meeting has been orchestrated both by Bruno and Tony for different reasons. After lunch, the two women retire to the executive washroom at the bank and during a sexual encounter declare their love for each other. The next day Bruno calls Alex to ask her to meet him at a Japanese brothel having recognized in her a kindred spirit. He offers to make her his protégé and apprentice and gives her a floppy disc which contains a computer virus which can wipe out international money transfers. Later Alex reveals this plan and her encounters with Bruno to Virginia who becomes very emotional and returns to the apartment she shares with Bruno and after an argument with the latter swallows a large number of pills. Bruno, scarcely less hysterical himself, calls in Tony to deal with the situation downing a number of pills himself in the process. In the midst of this drama, Alex rings and asks Bruno to meet her at a hotel. A little later after Bruno has left she rings the apartment again and finding Tony there also invites him over.

At the hotel, Alex sends Bruno off to another room when the doorbell buzzes and she sees via the peephole that Tony has arrived. Tony enters the room and is preparing to force himself violently on Alex again when Bruno bursts in with a gun and accuses Tony of raping Alex. In revenge, and in order, he says, to prove his love for Alex he decides to rape Tony himself and an extended and extreme but at the same time farcical scene ensues. Before Bruno can carry through on the final details of his threat however, Virginia, whom Tony had left unconscious in the car downstairs, turns up. The two women retire to another room and Virginia finally agrees to Alex's plan to escape to South America together. Virginia escapes and Tony goes after her. Alex warns Bruno of a plot to capture him and leaves and Bruno discovers the wire bug in Tony's discarded Calvin Kleins. Alex returns to her house to pack but runs into Tony who subjects her to more violence. Luckily for Alex, Bruno turns up and beats Tony to the draw, shooting him several times in the bulletproof vest his police colleagues have persuaded him to wear. It is unclear whether Tony survives or not. Bruno's helicopter arrives and he invites Alex to leave with him, bringing Virginia if she likes. She refuses. The final scene of the film sees the two women crossing the border into Mexico on a bus en route to China.

This is the basic plot, but it is realized rather differently across the two cuts of the film. This plot is also simply a device to hang an examination of complex games of power, sex, money and brinkmanship enacted between the four main characters.

Background and context

Befitting its title, this film has had an eventful history since its initial release in 1995. Indeed it should perhaps be set in film studies courses as an object lesson in the enormous differences editing and sound editing can make to a film. Directed by the maverick film director and painter Donald Cammell and co-written by himself and his wife China Kong, it has been released in three different versions. Cammell is probably best known for his cult monument to sixties counter-culture (co-directed with Nicolas Roeg) Performance (1970) and for the bizarre 1977 B-grade science fiction offering with Julie Christie, Demon Seed. However, since its re-release in completely re-edited form with Film Four funding at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August 2000, Cammell's last film has been slowly acquiring a reputation of its own. The director's cut is only available as a region 2 (UK) PAL DVD or video while only the first two cuts are readily available in region 1 NTSC format. The first and third cuts of the film could scarcely be more divergent. The second cut with the extended 'lesbian scenes' which had been excluded as too raunchy in the first version were reinserted after the actor Anne Heche achieved notoriety by 'coming out' as Ellen DeGeneres' lover in 1997. Quite incidentally this relationship was short lived and ended in 2000 with Heche subsequently reverting to her pre-Ellen heterosexuality marrying and having a child in 2001.

The production company Nu Image who originally financed the film was a company who specialized in exploitation films. When Cammell handed them his 3 hour art house cut they were horrified and taking the film from him, they completely recut it to a format they felt suited their market better. As China Kong notes in the documentary Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance 'They completely rejected the editing style. They did not understand it. They wanted to get to the sex much faster. They wanted more of it and they basically didn't want anything else to do with the story'. Editor Frank Mazzola adds: 'They sent an interoffice memo saying no montages, no flash forwards, no flashbacks, no cuts shorter than three feet'. The end result was, not unsurprisingly, less than imaginative - another forgettable addition to the low rent shelves of the local video shop and to late night TV schedules sandwiched in between the introduction agency and condom ads. Cammell, disgusted, removed his name from the film.

Cammell committed suicide not long after the release of his butchered film. Stories about the reasons for his suicide are conflicting. It is generally agreed that Cammell had a life long fixation with suicide. He was critical of the Western notion that death should be a chance occurrence and wanted to have control over the moment of his own death. (1) Some attribute his suicide to depression following the treatment of his film - he had a long history of bitter conflict with the producers of all his films - and a separation from his wife. Other accounts point to the fact that things were actually starting to improve for him with a reconciliation with his wife and new film offers coming in. It seems he may have killed himself so as to go out on a high note while he still felt he had control over his destiny. Before he died, however, he had conducted detailed discussions with his long time editor Frank Mazzola about the format that he had intended Wild Side to take and it was on the basis of these discussions that Mazzola re-edited the film. If comparing the two films, it is best to start by watching the director's cut with its non-linear narrative, better explanations of character motivation and more polished performances from the actors. One is then in an excellent position to appreciate how poor the 1995 version is. Critic Brian Pendreigh sums it up well: 'Nu Image's film is an intriguing mess, a flawed minor movie, whereas the new version is an effective companion piece to Performance.'

Indeed, there are numerous echoes of Cammell's 1970 film Performance to be found in Wild Side. It must be said however, that the latter does not engage in the same level of formal experimentation as Performance - where one can see the antecedents of Tarantino, Guy Ritchie and any number of music videos in its use of flash cuts, fractured narrative and other artistic film effects, not to mention its fascination with gangsters. On the other hand, Performance's failure to transcend sixties counter culture has had the effect of turning it into somewhat of a period curio. The same themes and ideas emerge in both films: the gangsters, the humiliation of the chauffeur, the expensive cars, planes, the questioning of gender boundaries particularly focusing on notions of masculinity, the explicit and perverse sex, complex and claustrophobic games of brinkmanship between four characters: two men and two women, drugs, mirrors, dressing up and outrageous clothes, wigs and dressing gowns. In Wild Side, Alex dresses up in bodices and wears different wigs and Bruno sports flamboyant Hawaiian shirts, purple pants, long silk dressing gowns (even worn under his outside coat when he goes out) and his hair is done is a short black bob - just like Virginia his wife as the latter points out to Alex. Indeed at one stage, three of the main characters - Virginia, Alex (wearing a wig) and Bruno all have the same black bob hairstyle. In many ways, Wild Side is merely a reworking of the same ideas and themes as Performance. The later film provides a more successful, polished and more disciplined treatment of these themes, whereas the strengths of the earlier film lie in its innovative and dazzling experimentation with form and in its documentation of sixties subculture.

Comparison of the 1995 and 2000 versions

The tacky beginning of the 1995 version with Alex fighting off the advances of a businessman on a plane, establishes the film's credentials as yet another cheap entry in the 'erotic (read soft porn) thriller' genre. Then in several sketchily drawn scenes, we see Alex being given a dressing down by her sleazy boss at work, and then talking to her (male) friend and confidante about her quarter of a million dollar mortgage. The inclusion of this very minor character is somewhat curious. He is the only decent human being in the whole picture. He worries about Alex's huge mortgage, is supportive when she tells him she has fallen in love with a woman and is unimpressed and unintimidated by Tony. He is also there without question to help Alex make a late night getaway to the airport. Perhaps this character exists merely to indicate that not all men are complete bastards, a conclusion that could be drawn only too easily from viewing the behaviour of the other male characters in the film. Be that as it may, on these extremely flimsy premises, Alex embarks on a career as banker by day and $1500 a trick prostitute by night. The implication is that there is not much difference between the two professions of banker and prostitute.

After an entirely gratuitous scene (deleted from the director's cut) featuring a Chinese client and a dildo, making perhaps a demonstrative but entirely peripheral point about Chinese 'erotic arts' which emphasise the prolonging of the pleasure of the anticipation of the act rather than the act itself, Alex receives a call from her agency who propose another client. (2) Again the function of this phone call seems to be to remind the viewer of the moral dubiousness of Alex's lifestyle and is omitted from the director's cut. By this stage, we can see that the film meets all the requirements for the discerning (or not so discerning) aficionado of exploitation flicks: lesbian sex, cunnilingus, semi-nudity, bondage, voyeurism, a brutal rape, an attempted male rape, bodices (although these are donned rather than ripped off) and most importantly, money and power.

The initial encounter between Alex and Bruno is given rather different treatment across the two cuts. In the first cut, we are treated to the ambient sound of traffic noise - all the sounds of urban sleaze - the only atmosphere possible in which to conduct such sordid goings on, according to the cheap clichés of the genre. The director's cut uses music only - which serves to emphasise how far all these characters live and interact in a private world of their own. In the first cut, Bruno's acquiescence in Alex's sexual role playing games is far less apparent with takes selected where Walken plays the situation with mocking detachment, indeed derision. In the director's cut, the scene is far less fragmented and provides a clearer picture of the games involving sex, money and power played by both Alex and Bruno - games they both manifestly enjoy. This scene also comes right at the beginning of the film in the director's cut. We have no idea who these two characters are or what is happening. In stark contrast is the stodgily linear construction of the narrative in the first cut. In the later cut, far more interestingly, it is only after this scene that we learn that Alex is a banker. In addition, the subsequent lengthier scenes with her highly unpleasant boss and her friend are far more effective in establishing her motivations for taking on such a risky moonlighting job.

Other differences between the two versions, apart from the mildly fragmented narrative time line, are Bruno's utterly self indulgent, self absorbed and hysterical reaction to Virginia's attempted suicide, played to ironic and comical perfection by Walken. In the first cut, we also see Bruno being set up for capture by the police. This disappointing and frustrating reassertion of the moral status quo is entirely and gratifyingly absent from the director's cut. Bruno gets away with it, as do the two women. It is the brutal, corrupt and self-serving representative of the official legal system who is punished in the end.

The bedroom scene with the two women is also different. This scene was absent from the first cut, then added to the second cut as mentioned earlier. The version in the second cut uses takes which are clearly aimed at pornographic exploitation. The later version places more emphasis on the erotic aspects of the encounter. In general, the other scenes between the two women are rather flat and redolent of 'movie of the week' in the first cut, but cut differently and with the addition of Sakamoto's ethereal music these scenes become invested with an intense erotic power in the director's cut.

The final scene in which the two women escape across the border into Mexico is accompanied by clichéd stock Mexican music in the original version. This is replaced by Sakamoto's wonderful dreamlike music in the later version. In her conversation with Virginia on the bus, in the original film Alex refers disparagingly to Bruno, a comment which is absent from the director's cut. The women need no longer refer back to the men at all - they are of absolutely no importance to them. Virginia says as she looks at a young man on the bus who reminds her of her first husband, that she is a woman with a past. Alex replies 'that makes two of us'. Men are a thing of the past for these two women. The ambiguity of Alex's relation with Bruno - as he says on a number of occasions he sees her as a younger version of himself - is far better highlighted in the later version. He recognizes in her a person as manipulative, lying, ambitious and sexually predatory as himself and Alex obscurely appreciates this. Far more emphasis in the earlier version is placed on scenes skewed towards Alex's moral censure of Bruno.

The last scene in the original cut is the shot of a man, looking for all the world like a candidate for a jeans commercial, getting off the bus. One cannot help but wonder, given the attention focused on this figure, whether he is a police spy, a final hint that they won't get away with it in yet another reassertion of the moral status quo. In the director's cut, the film finishes with a brief scene of the two women together which neutralises this possibility. The man who has got off the bus is the man who reminds Virginia of her first husband. This man, like all the other men, has been left behind by the women on their journey. One gets a glimpse of a pair of boxing gloves in the bag he is carrying designating this man as yet another performer of the more extreme manifestations of masculinity and power.

But even in butchered form, the subversive force of the film is still apparent. The most erotic scenes in the film are the scenes between the two women, but it is the scenes involving the males which are more challenging of the status quo - starkly exposing, condemning and ultimately ridiculing traditional equations of male sexuality and power and the consequent reduction of women to an invisible other. As Bruno says at one point: 'it's not about sex, it's about power'. (3) That the film works so well in its reflections on these mechanisms is due to the combination of a number of factors. First of all, there is the theatricality of the film with its concentration on the interplay between its four main characters and its use of almost exclusively interior settings, its stylized lighting and the use of mainly medium shots with the occasional close up to add to the dramatic force. One might also comment on the adventurous, sometimes playful handheld camera work (praised by Cammell in the DVD interview) which reinforces the impression of a kind of theatre and which does much to underline the chaotic excess of the characters. The director's background as a painter can also be seen in the choices of colours - rich stained glass tones of blues, reds and greens, with the background colours of the walls contrasting with and offsetting the characters' costumes. On at least two occasions, fadeouts of red and blue echo the colours that the central character in the scene is wearing. There are also subtle stylized still life compositions in some of the scenes with vases of flowers. The camera movement prevents this from being too obvious.

Acting performances

But all of this would be to no effect without the strong acting performances. Donald Cammell prided himself on being able to push actors beyond their most extreme limits. As a case in point, after Performance, James Fox left film to work for the Navigators, a non-profit Christian charity, for almost fifteen years. With the exception of a religious film he made in 1978, he did not return to acting until 1983. In Wild Side, we see four actors who are not afraid to go as far as it takes to explore the subject matter - in particular Walken. But no matter how over the top, Walken remains disciplined and in control throughout and far from being overwhelmed by the material, deals with it on his own terms and according to his own agenda. Of Walken's performance Alice Liddell, a reviewer on the IMDB, remarks perceptively:

This isn't an accomplished actor playing a role. This is an actor playing with the idea of acting, of effect, of taking any given situation, wrenching it out of narrative, and crushing it to his will, as he plays with it, examines it, tests it, mocks it, throws it away. You may be aghast at its self-indulgence, but it is actually rigorously controlled and painfully, hysterically funny, from the insecure gangster whining to the preposterously loud Hawaiian shirts.

Walken plays the role with a mocking ironic detachment, which far from trivializing or making light of proceedings, serves merely to emphasise and expose the problematic nature of the mechanisms linking male sexuality and power. This ironic detachment is perhaps more obvious in the takes selected for the first cut, whereas the takes selected for the director's cut place more weight on the grossly self-indulgent, self-pitying and self-absorbed aspects of the character. Again, the contemptible nature of these character traits is thrown into relief by Walken's sense of comic irony, for example in Bruno's extraordinarily self-indulgent reaction to Virginia's suicide attempt. The detachment, the stylization, the perverse and very real humour of Walken's performance allows the viewer to keep his or her distance, to remain uncompromised by their exposure to the extremities of what they are seeing. The viewer is then able to take the time to freely reflect on what is being presented without feeling manipulated or crowded into a corner. In short, as in many of his other performances, Walken manages to set up a buffer zone between the viewer and some very confronting material. At the same time, again as in other films (notably The Addiction and Communion), he injects a level of physical realism into proceedings which in no way lets the viewer off the hook. We don't see every last detail, but we see more than enough to well and truly get the picture.

To put it another way, Walken is practising a form of non-representational acting. Just as certain forms of non-representational painting, film and writing draw attention to the fact that as works of art they are not simply transparent reflections of 'reality', but objects in their own right, Walken draws attention to the fact that he is an actor acting a role. The viewer watches Walken subtly and with great skill deliberately foregrounding the idea that what you are seeing is not reality, but an artistic representation of 'reality'. Further to this, he is playing a character who is himself playing a character, namely that of the small time gangster. An international money launderer of his stature is scarcely a small time gangster and one sees the facade slip when he discovers the bug in Tony's Calvin Kleins and when he is inviting Alex to go away with him at the end. This kind of challenge to the idea of art as transparent representation of the real is something that one rarely sees in film acting and is something that Walken plays with in other films as well. As he notes in an interview: "I always know I'm in a movie. Having been in show business all my life, I'd feel hypocritical telling you it was real." He makes similar comments on a number of occasions, noting elsewhere for example, 'When I play these villains, I think people can see that's Chris, pretending to be Max (from Batman Returns) and Max knows he's really Chris, and Chris knows that you know that Chris knows that.' (4)

The other actors also put in fine performances. Anne Heche is suitably skittish, manipulative and ruthless as a woman living on the brink, always ready to use sex, money and power to manipulate those around her, to push every situation to and beyond its limits and to risk all to get what she wants. In the DVD interviews with Anne Heche and Donald Cammell conducted while the film was in production, both of them refer to the idealism of the character, but this does not emerge in any real sense in either version. After all, there are simpler solutions to Alex's debt problems than becoming a hooker, but she will not consider selling her very expensive house. One gains the impression instead, of overweening ambition and of watching a master class in manipulation. Alex's rejection of Bruno's invitation to make her his protégé is surprising. But then perhaps if she had not met Virginia who opens up for her a whole new world of sensation and the further transgression of limits and border crossing, then she may well have accepted Bruno's offer. One simply does not believe her protestations of moral outrage at Bruno's illegal financial activities and other behaviour. It is not clear whether this ambiguity is intentional or whether it is simply an artefact of Heche's performance. Either way it works.

Steven Bauer throws himself into his role with gusto and puts in a strong physical performance. This is not a role that calls for subtlety: his character really has no redeeming qualities and we are delighted to see him finally get his comeuppance at the end. Joan Chen plays her ambiguous and neurotic character to perfection. Like all the other characters she is a master of manipulation with her eye firmly on the main chance and prepared to go to any lengths to get what she wants.

Male sexuality and power

In many ways, it is rather surprising that this film was made by a man, even if one takes into account the fact that the script was co-authored by a woman. Donald Cammell in an interview on the DVD, notes that China Kong, who wrote all the dialogue, described the film as a 'women's film', which indeed it is. The film serves up a damning picture of how men conduct their relationships with the opposite sex and with each other, with the only viable relationship being the one between the two women. The actor Patrick Bauchau observes in the documentary on Cammell, that he was clearly battling most of his life with 'an innate distrust of masculinity in general and of his own in particular'. It is a distrust which emerges loud and clear in both Performance and even more so in Wild Side. But whereas in Performance, the women represent little more than the abstract challenge of the other, mere ciphers for male gratification, in Wild Side it is the women who have a strength and self sufficiency that is entirely lacking in the men.

As many feminists have pointed out, the identification between male sexuality and power which these two films so clearly throw into question has a long history in Western and other cultures. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, examines the Ancient Greek origins of this identification in Western culture in some detail in his History of Sexuality. He notes:

The Greek ethics were linked to a purely virile society with slaves, in which women were underdogs whose pleasure had no importance... The Greek ethics of pleasure is linked to a virile society, to dissymmetry, exclusion of the other, an obsession with penetration and a kind of threat of being dispossessed of your own energy, and so on. (1991: 344)

This kind of ethics is manifestly alive and well in all the male characters in Wild Side with the possible exception of Alex's friend. Bruno shortchanges Alex in his payment for her services just for fun - he has no intention of engaging in a fair exchange with a woman, he must take the opportunity to demonstrate his power and contempt. The woman is there purely for his use and pleasure as he makes abundantly clear. 'You're here to do me' he says. However, Alex is not in the least prepared to acquiesce and counters by dispossessing Bruno of more money than he is prepared to give over from his wallet. She also sets up a sex fantasy game and positions herself on top to begin with, which Bruno eventually objects to accusing her of being crazy. At the end of the encounter he ends up ridiculously and comically bound and gagged, complete with pieces of furniture tied to his body. Alex has managed to reverse the traditional structures of power and it is the male who has become an object, a possession tied up, dominated and held in place alongside the furniture.

Quite incidentally, bondage of one kind or another seems to have developed into a minor theme is some of Walken's films in the mid 1990s. His character is a wheelchair bound quadriplegic in Things to do in Denver when you are dead (1995) and he spends most of the time duct taped to a chair in Suicide Kings (1997). In the first film, Walken's character graphically draws attention again to issues relating to male sexuality and power. Even tied up, gangster Walken is still a force to be more than reckoned with.

Returning to Wild Side, the bound and gagged Bruno has to be rescued by his chauffeur while Alex is in the bathroom. Then in an attempt to wrest back his status as powerful alpha male, he launches into a long, somewhat hysterical diatribe for Tony's benefit, all the while waving his gun around and threatening to kill Alex. She must be an undercover cop, he says. No ordinary woman, of course, could possibly seek to challenge traditional gender power structures in such a way. Tony, increasingly panicked, tries to calm Bruno down, but when Alex emerges from the bathroom and is threatened by the gun, the gun turns out to be a mere toy. Bruno's powerful phallus is but a sham.

If Bruno recognizes and indulges a younger version of himself across the gender lines with the added titillation of power plays involving sex, Tony cannot allow such an assault on male power. Unlike Bruno he is not willing to play - he knows only one law and that is the law of violence (5) During his encounter with Alex, Bruno has accidentally left the phone off the hook with Tony eavesdropping in on the whole scene. Outraged, Tony, who secretly idolises Bruno, decides that this woman needs to be taught her place via the application of direct male sexual violence. Again, the echoes of Ancient Greek culture in the modern setting are all too apparent. Foucault notes that in Ancient Greece women's passivity denoted 'an inferiority of nature and condition; but there was no reason to criticize it as a behavior, precisely because it was in conformity with what nature intended and with what the law prescribed'.(1992: 215-16)

According to this schema, Alex is an unnatural woman and is just begging to be subjected to the full force of the law and indeed Tony - a policeman - is in fact quite literally a representative of a law created and held in place by men. The camera shots of Tony's leather boots as he violates Alex on the kitchen bench evoke images of Nazi jackboots (6) (Alex later in the film calls him a fascist) and the whole sequence is reminiscent of the famous butter scene in Last Tango in Paris. Tony's obsession with his own phallus, both real and imaginary, is also symbolized in another scene when he turns up to Alex's house and a retrieves a suggestively shaped ice confection from her fridge.

The connection to Last Tango in Paris might seem far-fetched until one recalls Cammell's long and disastrous association with Marlon Brando. Cammell had known Brando since the 1950s and had originally intended the main role in Performance for Brando. Like many others, he was fascinated with Brando remarking: 'He's not the only actor in the universe with great talent... He's the one that has been chosen to be deified. Much as Elvis was chosen. Part of the icon role is way beyond acting, and comes from being dangerously attractive in a psychosexual way. A great heap of sex appeal.' (cited in Beard and Hill) Cammell and Brando parted ways in 1974 after the former began a liaison with China Kong, the young daughter of one of Brando's lovers. They married four years later when she was eighteen. Cammell and Brando were eventually reconciled and two abortive attempts were made to make a film together. Brando withdrew from the second at the last moment taking a large part of his fee, bankrupting the production company in the process.

The centerpiece and denouement of Wild Side where all four characters come together in one scene occurs towards the end of the film. Again the resonances with Ancient Greek culture are more than plain. Foucault observes that in Ancient Greek culture there was a

'principle of isomorphism between sexual relations and social relations. What this means is that sexual relations - always conceived in terms of the model act of penetration, assuming a polarity that opposed activity and passivity - were seen as being of the same type as the relationship between a superior and a subordinate, an individual who dominates and one who is dominated, one who commands and one who is vanquished... And this suggests that in sexual behaviour there was one role that was intrinsically honorable and valorized without question: the one that consisted in being active, in dominating, in penetrating, in asserting one's superiority. This principle has several consequences relating to the status of those [slaves, women, boys] who were supposed to be the passive partners in this activity. Slaves were at the master's disposition, of course: their condition made them sexual objects and this was taken for granted ‚so much so that people could be astonished that the same law would forbid the rape of slaves and that of children. (1992: 215-16)

Bruno's threat to rape Tony is a literal enactment of this 'principle of isomorphism'. If ostensibly, he says, it is to prove his love for Alex and to avenge her honour, it is really intended as a lesson to Tony not to interfere with his property, 'his women' as he calls them. It is also intended to deprive Tony of his status as a man in front of Alex. (7) He is asserting his dominance, his right to own his subordinates, be they male or female, body and soul. That ownership also gives him sexual rights to their bodies. In a scene ghastly in its physical realism, Bruno forces Tony to his knees at gunpoint, making him take a condom out of his dressing gown pocket and forcing the horrified and repulsed Tony to put it on - on Bruno that is. From there, the scene evolves in a kind of macabre farce with Bruno forcing Tony to lean over a couch while he whips him with his own underpants. 'I paid for these Calvins! They are mine!' he declares dramatically. Bruno during these proceedings is amusingly over equipped with symbols of phallic power, alternately holding or sucking on an enormous cigar and waving a gun around at the same time. Walken is clearly having fun with the sheer absurd excess of it all.

Tony appears curiously willing to play along, unwilling to blow his cover and assert his status as policeman, even under these extreme circumstances. In a later scene, he rants about how much he wants to bring Bruno down and how long he has prepared for this moment. He is prepared to do anything, to play any game to negate the criminal anomaly, the threat to the law, the kind of power, that Bruno represents. He will submit to anything as long as he, the embodiment of what he sees as the legitimate law, can triumph in the end. Indeed, there is a whole reflection on law, legitimacy and justice in this scene. Alex after initially expressing horror, is cynically quite prepared to let Bruno get on with it and mete out his own version of an eye for an eye justice. After her failure to procure any protection and justice from the official representatives of the law (her phone call to Tony's boss had merely attracted threats of prosecution for solicitation) she is quite prepared to let Bruno stand in for justice on her behalf. As she says to Tony: 'this is what I call equal justice under the law right now. The law is under Bruno'. The three of them continue to negotiate in a no holds barred verbal chess game until Virginia unexpectedly turns up and by her mere presence defuses the whole situation. Game over, time to begin the next game.

The two women immediately retire to another room leaving the men without an audience. The two men pretend that it was all just play - nothing serious with drinks, hugs and banter all round afterwards. Quite incidentally, there is a lot of noticeable physical contact between the men in the film, notably between Bruno and Tony and Tony and his police boss. It is difficult to know how to interpret this. Perhaps it is intended to be read as yet another indication that true friendship and true bonding are only possible within same sex boundaries.

When Bruno follows Virginia and Alex into the bedroom, Alex shouts at him to leave and blocks the doorway with a full length mirror. Bruno's image is reflected back to him as he stands outside and continues to talk to them. When Alex emerges a little later to say that Virginia has escaped, she pushes Tony into the mirror as he rushes after Virginia and he breaks the mirror and injures himself. All these men see when they look at women is their own reflection and Alex forces Tony into a direct confrontation with his own macho violence as she pushes him into the mirror. When Virginia had attempted suicide earlier, Bruno is unwilling and unable to go through the doors of her room and bathroom that separate her from him and calls in Tony to break down the bathroom door. Mirrors - with all their references to problems of representation are an even stronger theme in Performance, in common with a lot of other avant-garde deliberation in film, art and philosophy in the 1960s. When one looks at the world one merely sees one's own reflection, not what is actually out there and all the men see when they look at women are reflections of themselves - more of the Same, they are unable to see any difference. The director, Cammell carried this preoccupation with mirrors right through to the end. As he lay dying after shooting himself, he asked his wife for a mirror so that he could watch his last breath.(Cullum and Merrill)

Alex and Virginia escape from the clutches of both men. A la Thelma and Louise we see them driving around in an earlier scene in an expensive convertible, wearing sunglasses and they are again wearing sunglasses and Alex a hat as they escape into Mexico on the bus. Just as Bruno eludes the law both figuratively and literally, so too do the two women. They do not need to drive over the edge of a canyon to preserve the status quo. They have 'crossed over' without penalty into the 'third world' as Alex says in the final voice over. Alex hands Virginia an apple. Virginia is not struck down by lightning and she does not offer the apple to a man.

Ultimately the conclusion of the film seems to be that there is an unbridgeable chasm between the sexes. Friendship and love are only possible between members of the same sex and women are far better at it than men.

Soundtrack

(1) 1995 version. The music by Jon Hassell, or at least what one hears of it, is excellent. Hassell is an avant-garde electronic musician known for his electronically treated trumpet playing and for his collaboration with Brian Eno in the 1970s and early 1980s. At the end of the film when the two women are escaping via Mexico on a bus we hear stock clichéd Mexican music which cuts out abruptly as the end credits come up and the edgy Hassell music which also opens the film starts playing. The change of mood is jarring; once again reinforcing the slapdash and B grade character of this cut of the film. I have already mentioned the addition of urban street noise to emphasize the moral sleaze of the initial encounter between Alex and Bruno. Elsewhere in the film, the music sounds as though it has been tacked on without much thought.

(2) 2000 version. The director's cut has kept the avant-garde electronic approach but this time has called on the talents of Ryuichi Sakamoto. Sakamoto first came to public attention as the founding member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra which played together from 1978 to 1983. His work has developed considerably since those days and he has done a number of film scores as well as much other work. His best-known film score is the haunting and evocative soundtrack to Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1982) including a song written in collaboration with English electronic musician and singer David Sylvian. In 1991 he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score for Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky. His soundtrack to Wild Side is magnificent. It adds a magical, lyrical and dreamlike, indeed epic atmosphere to the film doing much to smooth any harsh edges. It is particularly striking in the scenes between the female lovers. These scenes which verge on the exploitative are disciplined and controlled and eroticised by the magical quality of Sakamoto's music.

Walken essentials

Hair: Outrageous black bob: mid nineties fashion cut for men. His hair is so bizarre that some viewers are again convinced that it must be a wig.

Sources

Thanks: I would like to thank Haydn Chen, Luke Jacobs, Gary Foster, Robyn Heyworth and Bruce Mitchell for discussions and ideas in relation to this film and Lilykay9 and Carolyn Hinton for editorial suggestions.

References (websites, articles, books, documentaries)

Paul Beard and Lee Hill 'The man that time forgot', Neon, August 1997, Article on Donald Cammell

Paul Cullum and Tim Merrill 'Lost Angels: Under Pressure'. On Donald Cammell's career amongst others

Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance

Michel Foucault (1990) The History of Sexuality vol 1. An introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. French original 1976.

Michel Foucault (1991) 'On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress', in The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 34--72. Original publication 1984.

Michel Foucault (1992) The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality vol 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. French original 1984.

Michel Foucault (1996) 'Film and Popular Memory' in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 122-32. French original 1974.

Michel Foucault (1996) The simplest of pleasures' in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 295-7. Translation modified. French original 1979.

Michel Foucault, (1996) 'Sexual choice, sexual act', in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), New York: Semiotext(e), p. 322-34. French original 1982.

Michel Foucault (2000) 'The subject and power' in Power. Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Vol three. Edited by James Faubion. Translated by Robert Hurley et al. New York: The New Press. pp. 326-48. Original article published 1982.

Jon Hassell Spot Power site on Jon Hassell

Alice Liddell User review of Wild Side on the IMDB

Tom Dewe Matthews Donald Cammell: Shoot to Kill, The Guardian 01/05/1998

Brian Pendreigh 'A cut above' Friday January 14, 2000 The Guardian

Ryuichi Sakamoto Kai Seidler's site

The Servant's Quarters Site on James Fox.

Barbara Walters 'Search for Sanity: Anne Heche Talks About Childhood, Mental Illness, Ellen and New Love', 6 September 2001, ABC news.com site