Permissive

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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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.

A cautionary tale of Young women following a decidedly average rock band and giving themselves away whenever they can.. I mean lets start with the rock band, these guys are no Jim Morrison or Marc Bolan types, there are more Worzel Gummage lookers with their nicotine stained fingers, who probably smell like a mixture of sweaty socks and rotting sprouts.. they were incredibly plain dull and nauseating, off stage all they seemed to do was walk around in slow motion or sit staring into space and occasionally get it on with one of the young waifs who are strangely queuing up to be with them, goodness knows how they manage to get it up so to speak as they all seem so lifeless and dreary...

The girls don't really seem to know what they want, clearly the band are not that successful in terms of the films story, hence there is no glamour for them to ride on, just a life of long dark motorways, rusty transit vans, being groped by dirty nicotine stained hands and being used then cast aside... as for the busker/preacher character who was shoe horned into the story, the one who lives 'under the stars maaaaan' god that guy was terrible but luckily the segment with him in is only 15 mins or so and of course it goes without saying for a film about groupie girls there is also a very brief lesbian scene tacked into the film before its downbeat climax... I

I wouldn't say this film was truly abysmal, it was after all made in that late 60s / early 70s period with its styles, fashions and morals so was maybe quite shocking and meant to be a gritty piece of realism but now some 50 years on it all seems rather contrived and an opportunity wasted and traded just to show some skin... here we are now in 2020 so I dare say any of the surviving band members are probably sat in some old peoples home, bald and covered head to toe in nicotine patches staring into space as usual... whilst any of the girls are probably all about size 20 with 4 or 5 broken marriages behind them and lecturing their grand daughters about the perils of sleeping around...

Also bearing in mind its 2020, Netflix, amazon prime, even you tube have pretty much killed off home video / dvd... meaning your choices with this film are to try and track it down online or pay £14.99 or whatever the price is for a BFI blu-ray edition... is it worth it? Probably not, the extras might sway it for some people out there but this isn't worth wasting your money on.. that said if you see it cheap somewhere on your travels there are worse things you could buy!

5/10

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.