Permissive

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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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.

In the development stage the title for this truly dispiriting film was Suzy Superscrew. Better had it been kept for at least it gives you an idea of where the action is heading. Suzy is a duffle-coated runaway, arriving in London to join the groupie scene. Unable to score with the band her groupie friend introduces her to, she hooks up with Pogo an itinerant musician and mad preacher. "Where do you live?' she enquires of him. "Under the stars, the world is my scene, man", he responds. Unfortunately the world isn't listening as he gets mown down by a car shortly afterwards. The subsequent narrative is reduced to what band member or groupie Suzy will wake up with next.

The film, shot in a quasi documentary style and was partly intended as a promotional vehicle for heavy rock band Forever More, which accounts for their music being way up in the mix and sometimes drowning out the dialogue. This same logic explains footage of the band performing being inserted whenever the director runs out of ideas, which is often. On the plus side the relentlessly downbeat tone does provides a telling snapshot of the fag-end of the sixties and a particular sub-culture, while at the same time maintaining a grim synergy: hairy men and ugly women having bad sex together in cheap hotels to a Forever More soundtrack. Just desserts are sometimes delicious.

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.

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.