Rage

Rage

Directed
by Sally Potter

Runtime:
98 min.

The best
thing about Rage, Sally Potter’s
movie mystery, is its simplicity. Potter defies the digital era’s fascination
with new technology by emphasizing its limitations (it will premiere on mobile
phones beginning Sept. 21). Through straightforward, head-on, close-up video
interviews of 14 people who witnessed an incident at a fashion runway show,
Potter relays a variety of emotions, personal philosophies, class experiences.
Her video technique doesn’t substitute for cinematic variety or photochemical
richness. Instead, strict adherence to the basic things that digital media
record (a face, place, moment) helps to appreciate the difference between video
and film. Eschewing the lazy carelessness of so many misguided digital
enthusiasts, Potter’s rigor becomes a refreshing reminder of true cinematic
values.

Potter’s
formal experiment is also shrewd. Rage’s narrative core is a murder mystery but,
instead of investigating exactly what happened (the routine Who Did It? or How
Was It Done?), Potter details the personal reactions of fashion industry people
connected to the tragedy. It’s a deconstructed view of the fashion world’s
designer, manufacturers, publicists, models, photographers and hangers-on—all
caught in the allure of money, celebrity, power and simple modern furor.
Through Potter’s pared-down approach, her actors’ faces convey contemporary
experience. These headshots critically re-focus the basic format of fashion
photography in order to penetrate what only seems obvious. Potter knowingly
quotes John Berger’s seminal essay “Ways of Seeing.”

It’s
also shrewd that Potter picks over a dozen camera-worthy performers; actors who
know how to occupy the space before a lens. Steve Buscemi, Judi Dench, Eddie
Izzard, John Leguizamo, David Oyelowo, Dianne Wiest, Jakob Cedergren, Simon
Abkarian, Patrick J. Adams and Riz Ahmed give these fashion-world types
defining eccentricities. The sense of a social mosaic—voicing individual
ambitions, venting their own resentments—also suggests a deconstruction of
Altman’s naturalistic, Olympian worldview. (The fashion/murder plot combines
the cattiness and intrigue of Altman’s Ready
To Wear and Gosford Park.)

Potter’s
most fascinating characters are the most opposite: Jude Law’s Minx, a pansexual
supermodel, and Adriana Barraza’s seamstress Anita de Los Angeles. Between star
and minion, Potter explores the industry’s superficiality as something that
workers both indulge and suffer. These are major characterizations for the
extraordinary way Law reveals levels of seductiveness (his specialty) and
Barraza breaks the surface of working-class humility. Caught in the midst of
scandal, Barraza screams, “I don’t want to be famous. I want to be invisible!”
Balancing Minx’s panicky narcissism, it’s an ironic plea against the harsh
competitiveness that Potter exposes.

Rage examines what’s beneath
the surface of professional composure and what lies behind the different
facades of human representation—whether it’s deliberately coy models such as
Law and Cole, Dench’s cynical journalist or Cedergren’s publicist Otto.
Potter’s form—using coordinated blue-screen and off-camera sound (sirens,
gunshots, screams, whirring camera, chanting protestors, runway music)—keeps
viewers in analytical mode. Her most poignant gimmick—a silent montage of
shocked faces following a tragedy—recalls what Carl Dreyer knew about the power
of close-ups. Potter knows that casual use of this tool has become an aesthetic
casualty of the digital video age.