QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TIFF ROMANIA

Imagine an American director decides to adapt a little-known short story by Arthur Miller into film. The story is about a Jewish American tap dancer who becomes highly successful in Nazi Germany, even winning Hitler’s heart. That director casts her brother in the lead, an actor with no dancing skills and questionable acting abilities. She hires a British actor to play a friendly SS officer, and 40 Romanian actors to embody the extras, and voice some of the evil Germans. The story is filmed in present-day Bratislava (the capital of Slovakia), a quaint and colourful small city barely reminiscent of oppressive, mid-century Berlin. The outcome is as bad as it sounds. Or perhaps a little worse.

At an interminable 111 minutes, The Performance starts in the year of 1936 in New York. Tap dancer Harald May (Jeremy Piven) has a successful career ahead, and his ambitions drive him to the Kit Kat Club of Berlin, despite Germany’s increasing hostility towards Jews. He is able to conceal his real surname Markowicz, and his looks aren’t particularly Semitic. So he “passes” as a non-Jew. Jeremy Piven is clearly no Fred Astaire: he can’t sing, he can’t dance, and he does not exude charisma. The tap dancing (or stomping) is clumsily body doubled to awful results. He is supported by a devoted troupe. One day, the group attracts the attention of the Fuehrer himself (the most risible impersonation of Hitler I have ever seen; this is not intended to comedic purposes, but just atrocious casting). Harald contemplates jumping out of the window, before being persuaded to show his moves to the German head of state. Hitler loves it, and demands more: “Weiter, weiter!”.

From that point on, the tension begins to build around the titular performance, a widely advertised show intended to catapult Harald to the Pantheon of greatest dancers in the history of Germany. Doting SS Officer Fugler (Robert Carlyle) is supportive of the artist on every step of the way. Harald has a half-baked romance with Carol Conway (Maimie McCoy). Their chemistry is as fizzy as a Coca-Cola left opened for several days. His friend Benny Worth (Adam Garcia) is a lot more prolific with the ladies, his constant dalliances eventually getting on Harald’s nerves. He bemoans: “can you please fuck a little less loud”, in what’s probably the movie’s most audacious attempt at humour. Otherwise the sparse laughs are confined to a German patron who cannot pronounced Harald’s name, leaving “HAA-RAALD” visibly annoyed. And a strange and ominous bird that spews vulgar German, and refuses to fly at command.

Tensions rise when Harald is asked to undergo a medical examination in order to establish that he is not Jewish. He is very concerned that his manhood could betray him. The test involves measuring his skull, his jaw and dropping his trousers. Will Harald survive this very intrusive procedure of very questionable scientific value?

There is absolutely nothing to savage here. The dancing is tedious, the acting is middle-of-the-road, the photography is mediocre. Piven blends archive with the fictionalised sequences, but it just looks clumsy, as does most of the mise-en-scene. She also blends sharp images with grainy footage of Harald May, slightly burnt around the edges, as if it was captured by a vintage cinematographic apparatus. This devicxe makes no narrative sense. It looks more like student experimentation than a multi-million production involving multiple nations. The ending is particularly predictable and tortuous. Even the fight scenes are poorly staged. This is the Nazi resistance drama you don’t need to see.

The Performance just premiered in the Supernova section of the 23rd edition of Tiff Romania.