Performance

Overview

Films for grown-ups. They're regretfully rare (and I bemoaned this rarity just last week), but we have one in Performance. What could be construed merely as a music film is in fact a tightly wound, deliberate and sensitive depiction of creative, platonic and romantic relationships on the edge of destruction.

Affairs, betrayals, sacrifice — together this list appears as standard soap opera material. But in the assured hands of former documentary-maker Yaron Zilberman, they are so much more.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken and Mark Ivanir give astonishing performances as members of an esteemed Manhattan string quartet. As a creative family, the quartet's future is thrown into doubt when Walken's character develops Parkinson's — a particularly devastating diagnosis for a musician whose profession hinges on the dexterity of his hands.

Here is a film that presents the complexities of regret, the price of compromise and the undoable consequences of the decisions you only realise in retrospect were, in fact, decisions. All these themes find their mirror in the intimacy and sacrifice of the quartet's musical collaboration and the intensity of their tenuous creative bonds.

Performance is finely tuned and deeply moving. Its precise, dynamic dialogue gives the impression of being written by a master playwright. Its score rates a special mention — composer Angelo Badalamenti also wrote Twin Peaks''unforgettable theme. Its characters are fully fledged vessels of hurt, resentment and miscommunication, but they're not monsters — they're just actually human. And for a real, grown-up, mainstream film, that's not just unusual, that's something to treasure.