It’s hard for me to review Rage, a film whose conception I’ve been tracking from the corner of my eye since I interviewed Sally Potter in 2006 and nosily scoped out the notes and images in her workspace. It’s been a delicious secret that I’ve had to keep (especially with Berlin’s strict embargo rule) so close that now I come to review it, I almost don’t want to say anything apart from: go see it, it’s not like anything you’ve seen before. Really.
As the stills that have been creating hype imply, the film is structured as a series of interviews shot against greenscreen. Fourteen actors – some international superstars like Judi Dench and Jude Law, some exciting emerging talents like Riz Ahmed – each spent two days with Potter, shooting their characters’ interviews in a series of photographers’ studios, with Potter herself behind the camera.
There’s a tantalising intimacy to that setup that translates to the screen, a playful reworking of 1970s feminist confessional documentaries spiced up with equal parts Big Brother and Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills. At first, the rage of the title is pretty much the mania for Warhol’s 15 seconds that seems to have overtaken everyone in the twenty-first century as we blog, vlog, autobiog and reality TV show our way into total visibility.
What Rage makes clear is that such a pervasive visibility is, like the beauty held up by the fashion industry, not even skin-deep. We might be visible, but who is really looking at us, or really listening to us? Not to the selves we present as a collection of hip labels and cool events, or victim litanies and lists of scars, but what lies deeper, the things we confess to ourselves in the middle of the night. Rage’s genius is that it captures both selves on screen – and catches, too, at the process whereby listening, the originary act of psychoanalysis (which is historically cinema’s twin), structures the process of revelation.
Each actor plays a character who plays a part in a fashion show, from the designer (Simon Abkarian) and his models (Jude Law and Lily Cole) through the seamstress (Adriana Barraza) to the fashion house tycoon (Eddie Izzard) and his body guard (John Leguizamo). As they describe their roles to the videophone camera held up by schoolkid Michelangelo, those roles begin to break down and the people inhabiting them start to surface.
Cinema is littered with confession, to the point where Robert Lepage was compelled to make The Confessional, a meta-cinematic story about the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess in Québec. And confession is our breakfast muesli and teatime treat. We’ve become incredibly used to a subject gazing tearily or triumphantly at a camera, telling us what we want to hear, with YouTube offering a constant stream of simulated interaction from ‘how to apply eyeliner’ videos to matey Dave C.’s home chats.
So Rage feels instantly familiar in its face-to-face confrontation, then shockingly strange in its absence of everything but the face, then absolutely, perfectly right. It made me re-imagine, say, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, filmed just with actors, in costume, speaking their letters into the camera. No hedges, no chandeliers, no horse-drawn carriages. Just people and their faces, their emotions, their lies. That kind of epistolary novel is the closest I can come to describing the film: the viewer, in possession of more knowledge than any one character, is drawn into Michelangelo’s role as witness and agitator.
It’s an extraordinary feat of storytelling on Potter’s part that the viewer is in no doubt about the relationships between these people, about the milieu in which they work, about how their confessions do and don’t fit together, even though no two characters ever appear in the frame at the same time. It’s also an extraordinary testament to the mindbrain, which can conjure a very specific vision of an elaborate fashion show from a few lines of spoken description and some pulsing music, which throw open the vast catalogue of images we carry around with us. With the stringency of the visual field, sound becomes insanely important, and Jean-Paul Mugel’s sound editing is innovative, precise and telling. Not intent on creating the internal soundworld of a protagonist (as in Gus Van Sant’s extraordinary use of sound in elephant), Mugel and Potter use sound to build an entire lifeworld, one shared by all the protagonists, a constant on offscreen sound – from traffic noises to protestors – that binds them together into a single reality.
Its power was most noticeable for me in the final sequence, when Michelangelo’s investigation into the fashion world, the murders he has tangentially documented, and the protest he has fomented by posting his work online, come together explosively.
Offscreen.
Onscreen, we see the silent, upturned faces of character after character, looking at Michelangelo’s camera – and turning away. It’s a chilling moment for the protagonist with whom we, has his constant viewer, have been aligned: we have seen too much and done too little, or vice versa. Michelangelo’s work as a campaigning filmmaker has brought death on what sounds like a huge scale.
What sounds like the scale of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. Guns, sirens, helicopters, screams, silence. Rage is set in New York for lots of fascinating reasons, but it’s at this moment that its setting is most poignant and pointed – and most palpable. It links the susurrant rage in the film – at globalisation, at the crashing economy, at job losses, at the abuse of female beauty, at invisibility – to Potter’s previous film YES (2005), a romance between a Lebanese man and an American woman both living in London, which spoke in its most powerful confrontation between the couple of the source of the rage that fuels attacks like 9/11, ultimately in feeling unseen. Not invisible, for we are all under surveillance, whether on government databases or on Facebook, but unseen.
There’s two aspects of the film’s use of invisibility to get us to see the unseen that fascinated me most. The first is the invisibility of New York, that hyper-visible city, the most instantly recognisable skyline in the world. What I saw through its invisibility was the unseen New York, not least the history of union organising among immigrant workers in the garment trade, as embodied by Dianne Wiest as the daughter of the Jewish family who founded the fashion company. Incidentally, she has Rage’s finest line (delivered in Wiest’s trademark honeyed, patient voice): “My name’s Wrath.”
It’s only when she qualifies that I heard “Edie Roth,” a name that calls up that Jewish lower middle-class New York of Woody Allen’s autobiographical films, but also the queer outsider community of the Factory and the beginning of the end of that other, socialist, labouring NY. It’s the kind of quietly clever, deeply poetic writing in which the film delights, and which is the other strength seen through invisibility. While costumes, hair, makeup and above all performance take on the role of location, props and even camera movement brilliantly, the framework that allows them to do so is the writing.
Not dialogue but monologues with small gaps for Michelangelo’s reaction, the deep patterning and careful ear for how speech is both individual and marks us as a member of a group (gang, age, profession, class) allows the actors to inhabit their characters more than fully. It enlivens, emboldens and enriches the film, engaging ear, heart, mind, memory, intelligence, even skin and senses as a brilliant texture like that of the gorgeous fabrics and colours worn by the actors (Eddie Izzard’s suits, in particular, are to die for, and a fantastic comment on gendered sartorial codes but that’s a whole other article – and yes, he nails the American accent zingingly).
Of all the elements that make up a film, language is by far the cheapest one (not least because writers are frequently, and as standard, underpaid for their contribution). It costs nothing to provide an actor with a well-crafted line, to hone their dialogue to reflect origin or pretensions or politics. It’s been one of the most praised aspects of the new American TV, from The Sopranos and Buffy to The Wire and Deadwood.
But film’s Shakespearean ambitions have been all about showing the ring of fire rather than conjuring it for us to believe in. Find beauty (and horror) in the shapes composed by film in your mind’s eye overlaying what’s on screen. It’s an incredibly generous move from a traditionally open-hearted filmmaker. This solution to the credit crunch – give, give, give, not things that are financially expensive, but that cost heartblood (the screenplay was in the works for ten years) – and you shall perceive. Rage, which transmutes its fierce emotion into the dialogue of looks and words that so many ragingly violent situations need, shows us a new way to go: listen, and you shall be heard. Speak resonantly, and you shall be seen.
