One of the best films I ever saw   May 22, 2007

The Ultimate Performance, but sadly over-looked.   July 8, 2004

Dated, yet not to be missed   May 30, 2004

More than a gangster filem   February 1, 2004

When we compare this visionary work to the current productions from Hollywood and elsewhere it is like receiving a message from another universe! There is no comparison. This is a unique work. Just don't expect a hollywood ending. This film is an enigma.


A disturbing, fascinating and notoriously difficult film   February 13, 2001
  21 out of 51 found this review helpful

'Performance' has been frequently referred to by some critics as a
great British gangster movie along with 'Get Carter' or
'Brighton Rock' and by others as being a major modernist
text. For me it is neither of these things. The gangster motif only
occupies half of the film and the narrative was shredded by the
production company after shooting. That said the gangster setting is
effectively menacing and of vital consequence to the thematic thrust
of the work. Modernism (as it was by the late 1960s) was in summary an
ideological attempt to purify forms against the burdens of history or
aesthetics - to affirm a functional use value orientated system
- or the 'political economy' of the sign. 'Performance'
seeks to challenge the dominant semiotic thesis, to blur the
distinctions between sign and signifier - to confront conceptions
of meaning and logic in the tradition of Nietzsche. In the sense of
being contra-modernism, 'Performance' might be at the vanguard
of the postmodern movement, but like Jean Baudrillard, at the heretic
post-structuralist arm of that movement. 'Performance' in many
ways is there at the margins; the margins of pop and the underworld;
of crime and big business; of the optimistic 1960s and dour 1970s; of
decaying modernist ideology and advancing postmodernism; of what could
be produced by a major film company. Above all the film seeks to
expose the myth of the binary oppositions which are underwritten by
our system of language: life/death, male/female, fantasy/reality and
the entire problematic of the representative relationship. This
problematic, and its references to the work of Bataille and Borges, is
eloquently described in Jean Baudrillard's 1976 work 'Symbolic
Exchange and Death' (translated into English in 1993) which should
be essential reading for anyone who is intrigued and mystified by this
important film. On the other hand, those who seek a taut gangster
thriller would be well advised to look elsewhere to avoid
disappointment