Anita Pallenberg makes seductive women seem capable of giving orders. We value the authority she brings to Performance and Barbarella, though a scattered acting career gives us less to judge than her reputation might suggest.
Fi1m perspective
In Performance (1970), Anita Pallenberg’s Pherber makes seduction feel dangerous. Her authority belongs in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s film, where a gangster’s search for shelter brings James Fox and Mick Jagger into an uneasy contest. We were unsettled by the pleasure of those encounters, because Jack Nitzsche’s music makes them inviting without softening their cruelty. Pallenberg fits that mixture of attraction and menace, and it gives us the clearest reason to rate her. The film sometimes grows tiresomely pleased with its psychedelic interruptions; nobody in the cast can quite cure that.
The early films repeatedly give her women with power, mystery or both. Volker Schlöndorff’s A Degree of Murder (1967) gave her her first substantial film part, Marie; Barbarella (1968) cast her as the Great Tyrant opposite Jane Fonda. The latter is a good fit for her ability to make authority sensual, without much need to pretend she is ordinary. There was also Ginette in Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger Is Dead (1969), before Performance gave her the role for which she is most noted.
Her screenplay work with Cammell on Performance deserves attention too. Its strongest passages keep the two men’s competing demands in view, letting their uncertainty about each other sustain the tension. That matters when the more wayward stretches threaten to lose it. Contemporary coverage sometimes treated Pallenberg as a muse. That description has little to say about the work she did here.
Her subsequent acting became intermittent, with a return to occasional roles from the late 1990s and later appearances in independent films. Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (2008), in which she plays the Queen, is one such appearance. We cannot trace a steady development through such intermittent work, however tempting it might be to make a grander claim for her. Start with Performance, provided a little self-indulgence need not spoil an evening.
Biography
Anita Pallenberg was an Italian-German actress and model. She appeared in films including Barbarella (1968) as the Great Tyrant, Candy (1968) as Nurse Bullock, and Dillinger Is Dead (1969).
In Performance (1970), directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, she played Pherber and received a screenplay credit. Later credits included Absolutely Fabulous (1992) and Chéri (2009).
Pallenberg was born on 6 April 1942 in Rome, Italy, and died on 13 June 2017 in West Sussex, England.
