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.