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Sally Potter
RAGE
Berlinale - 59. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin
Berlinale Palast, Berlin
reviewed by Gary Levinson

From the perspective of a color therapist, Rage must be an intriguing film. Against a solid background of different changing colors, dialogs with several individuals take place. These colorful interviews are recorded by a school boy for transmission on his web site. This all takes place over the course of seven days.

Several important questions are raised:
What is the significance of the boy’s name, Michelangelo?
What is the significance of the designer’s name, Merlin? (Merlin and Michelangelo are both ‘M’ words)
Why does the whole action take place over seven days? Is this a biblical reference?
What possesses the firm’s owner to join in the protests? Is she just ‘infiltrating the enemy’ or has she really switched sides? And if so why?
What are the protesters protesting about anyway? (There is some innuendo about sweatshops, but the reason for the protests is not made clear.)
What is the point of this whole film?

And a few less important questions come to mind:
Why is Dame Judi Dench smoking a joint?
What is the point of Jude Law’s being a transvestite?
How did Sally Potter get so many famous people to act in her film (Judi Dench, Jude Law, Dianne Wiest, Steve Buscemi, Lily Cole, Riz Ahmed, etc.)?
What exactly does this whole thing have to do with (quoting Miss Roth) “the garment trade, what’s today know as the fashion industry”?

My attentive and thoughtful viewing was not enough to answer these questions. Maybe ‘M’ really is for ‘Mystery’…. (’M’ is the name of a designer fragrance in the film.)  Anyway, this is not to say that the film was without interest. The camera work, with extremely close cropping that makes the actors almost pop-out of the screen in three dimensions, the lighting, the quality of the dialogs, and the backgrounds of different changing colors, all keep one’s interest. It’s 99 minutes well spent. Now if I only had some clue as to what the whole thing was about….

Reviewed by Gary Levinson

http://www.berlinale.de

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Film Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.