Permissive

I just watched this as a restored BFI DVD and I'm glad someone took the trouble to bring this film back to public attention.

It has the look of being docu-drama, with nothing glossy, as it tracks a young woman coming to London to join her friend in the big smoke. Dressed in duffel coat and thoroughly unschooled in life, she finds her friend not the perfect protector, though friendly and helpful.

Her friend holds, and guards, the coveted position of band-leader's girlfriend amongst a gaggle of groupies and is well ensconced in the life of swinging London.

There are drugs and sex, all of it mundane and unglamourous. People use the drugs to check their feelings and avoid the hurt and fears they all want to be too cool to have.

There is living on the streets and the drudgery of a band constantly packing up its Ford Transit and moving from one cheap hotel to the next.

But the director uses a great device to imbue scenes with tension and momentum, sneaking us little flash-forwards in the lives of the characters, silent clips of where they will soon be - whether it's having sex on a toilet or dead.

Along the way we see the band playing, and have their music on the soundtrack giving a great authentic feel.

The film isn't about the band though, it's about the women who follow them. What looks like it is starting out as a moralistic tale about women getting abused by callous men in their naiveté, develops into something much more powerful.

The men are pushed into the background and hardly show any initiative. They are pretty much 2-dimensional, unobtrusive and show little in the way of being predators. One guy is painted that way, but is not ruthless and far from the centre of focus and actually does display more to his character.

I have a friend who went to an all-girls school and assures me that, as a man, I would never know how brutal a female pecking order can be. In films, we see it all the time with the core cliché of the beautiful girls who get usurped by the plainer girl who wins the heart of the hero. But it's usually there to show the underdog winning through despite the machinations of the beautiful stereotypes.

I feel this film does something quite rare. It makes women and their relationships the subject of the film, and attempts to make it authentic as well - even rarer.

This may well be an accurate picture of rather plain girls coming down to London, hooking up with rather ordinary rock musicians and being lugged around the country providing the off piste extras. It is, however, without doubt a dull, dreary and depressing view of life. The guys may look okay on stage but there is a distinct lack of presence or barely of life backstage where they seem even more morose than the girls who wait to open a fly, or two. There is some attempt to vary the dismal look or the proceedings with rapid zooms and speeded up flash backs and even flash forwards but would I ever want to see this again? No thanks.

Made in 1972 and relatively forgotten about since the BFI recently restored it onto Blu-Ray and DVD, Permissive follows the fortunes of a young girl who enters the world of the rock star groupie, back when Britannia was cool and was at the forefront of fashion and music. Suzy (Maggie Stride) arrives in London and meets up with her friend Fiona (the unfortunately named Gay Singleton), who is in a relationship with the hairy-faced Lee (Alan Gorrie), bass player and lead singer of rock band Forever More. She adopts the lifestyle and offers herself for sex to the bands various sleazy members before she is left behind as the group go on tour. On their return, she is eventually accepted and begins to fall into a moral downward spiral.

Perhaps quite shocking in its day, showing plenty of full frontal nudity, drug abuse and generally questionable behaviour, the film now seems extremely mild and somewhat tedious. The acting is especially dubious, mainly from the band members of real-life group Forever More, who although not given much to do, look noticeably uncomfortable delivering their lines. It isn't without good points however – Suzy's decline from wide-eyed innocent into full-blown slut who seems to have no goal other than to have sex with as many people as possible without a second thought of the effect it will have on her friends, is very interesting, and is performed reasonably well by Stride.

Interesting to view as a time-capsule of a time when extreme facial hair was cool and free-love was frowned upon, but as a piece of filmmaking it cannot hide from its low-budget limitations, and the years have had its effect on the film's power.

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PERMISSIVE is a surprisingly grim and unworkable film that marks an early milestone in the career of cult director Lindsay Shonteff. The story follows the fortunes of a couple of groupies as they hang around with the dregs of society in the form of a rock band, looking for fame, fortune and love and finding only seediness and squalor instead. It's a grubby little production that seems to go nowhere for its entire running time, instead dawdling around with a presentation of completely unlikeable characters who garner too much screen time. Shonteff shoehorns in some gratuitous nudity, but it's not enough to retain the viewer's interest.

These early 70's groupie films were one of the most uber-depressing cycle of films I've ever seen, and really make you wonder why ANY girl at any time would ever want to be a groupie since it inevitably leads to heartbreak, squalor, venereal disease, and a tragic end--the only apparent upside being getting to sexually service talentless hair-ball rock musicians like the real-life band Forever More. The bleak ending of this is SO bleak, it makes you lose sympathy even for the protagonist herself, which is one reason why I think the similar UK film "Groupie Girl" is definitely superior to this one (the girl in that is also serving as a sperm dumpster to slightly more talented musicians).

My personal favorite film in this cycle though is the German film "I, a Groupie", which features the incredibly sexy Ingrid Steeger and at least provides a lot of eroticism along with the downbeat degradation. The girl in this, Maggie Stride, is not unattractive, but definitely pretty ordinary-looking compared to the smoking-hot Steeger. And speaking of smoking-hot, apparently the famous Collinson twins, stars of Hammer's "Twins of Evil" have a small part in this film, but I'm not sure where exactly (they also appear, much more prominently, in "Groupie Girl").

Lindsay Shontieff is an interesting director, mostly for his rather black-hearted view of humanity--even his outright sex comedies like "The Big Zapper" contain some memorably nasty, misanthropic turns. He does use some interesting devices here like flash-forwards that give glimpses at the ultimate fates of many doomed characters. The band Forever More meanwhile comes off like such a collection of untalented and unlikeable douchebags,you have to wonder why they agreed to be in this (or why they didn't subsequently sue Shontieff). Still, while this movie is definitely inferior to "Groupie Girl" and "I, a Groupie", it isn't totally bad (like the aptly-named American groupie flick "Bummer!"). But definitely don't expect to be uplifted here.