Performance. (1970)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
In underworld terms, Chas Devlin is a 'performer,' a gangster with a talent for violence and intimidation. Turner is a reclusive rock superstar. When Chas and Turner meet, their worlds collide—and the impact is both exotic and explosive.
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What critics compared Performance. to
The casting of James Fox in a supporting role and the sporadic fracturing of continuity – in the middle of a fateful confrontation, the movie simply leaps ahead in time, filling in the gaps later with teasing flashback snippets – evokes memories of Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance.
That opening scene serves as a dark and funny omen for what follows in this stylish thriller that evokes numerous British crime dramas like "Performance" and "The Long Good Friday."
Other pleasures include a chilling performance by Ian McShane, and the welcome reappearance of James Fox in a criminal setting, an echo of "Performance", more than 30 years ago.
As the undead lovers, Ms. Swinton is a feline fashion layout, and Mr. Hiddleston, as a dead rock star who looks like Mick Jagger in Performance, is a bare-chested poster boy for bohemian allure.
Having lived in recent years as a cult rock musician, he’s gone into reclusion in what seems to be the last house standing in Detroit—a crumbling mansion stocked with sound equipment, a place so dark and cluttered in its bohemian splendor that, as rock-star retreats go, it makes Turner’s Notting Hill pad in Performance look like the winner of a Neatest Nest competition.
Style, color, throwaway incidents and music are essential, as in unaccountably maligned The Hunger, in oddball Cronos, in now-coming-into-its-own Ganja and Hess and its aka?s, even non-physical-bloodsuckers Performance .
In my opinion, it's the most powerful evocation on film of the dissolution of sanity and identity since, back in 1969, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel collaborated on the neglected Performance, an exuberant tour of the dark side where the fact that things don't make sense is exactly the point.
Not for nothing does Scarlett Johansson, a siren in the natural order, look like Mick Jagger in Performance, or maybe, at an angle, James Fox. It’s not that Jonathan Glazer’s masculinised her per se, but he has succeeded in turning one of the world’s most desirable women into the awkward, slightly built alien of Michel Faber’s source novel.
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Boyle has cited Nicolas Roeg as an influence on the film’s disorienting style, and sure enough, “Trance” shares the jagged subjectivity of “Performance” and “Don’t Look Now,” along with the director’s raw treatment of anger and arousal.
The swoony, kitschy romanticism of "Nights in White Satin" complements a set-up that suggests "Performance" (1972), the 1970s French vampire movies of director Jean Rollin and other period pieces in which odd characters inhabit weird mansions in states of dreamlike reverie.