Performance

Pop stars continue to have bad luck in films.

The movie is a facile enough pastiche of underground pyrotechnics and Euro-art pretensions, but far more evocative now is the fast, offhand repartee between the principals.

Rapture and boredom both seem valid responses.

Roeg's debut as a director is a virtuoso juggling act which manipulates its visual and verbal imagery so cunningly that the borderline between reality and fantasy is gradually eliminated.

It isn't altogether successful, largely because it tries too hard and doesn't pace itself to let its effects sink in.

With a pleasurably peculiar cast of James Fox, Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Performance is one of the weirdest slices of Seventies London around, combining gangster violence and ritual humiliation with decaying rock-star glamour.

For all its hallucinatory excesses, however, Performance is a film of ideas, even if it's happier to let them swirl around than attempt to explain them.

This hallucinogenic deconstruction of identity writhes with sex, substances, ultraviolence and good ol' rock'n'roll.

Visually dazzling, finely acted investigation into such diverse matters as identity, sexuality, violence, power, and underground culture in late 1960s London.

It put Roeg's powerful cinematic style on the cultural map for the first time.

[VIDEO] "Performance" pioneered a slew of modern cinematic techniques adopted by such master filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, and Gaspar Noé.

Comes across as pretentious in spots but has not lost its '60s hallucinogenic suggestiveness. It haunts like the dream just out of reach of the rational concrete.