Berlinale. "Rage"

By David Hudson on 02/10/2009

"Rage" might have worked. Once you've seen the stills, you've pretty much grasped the concept: Actors, most of them pretty big names (and most famously already, Jude Law in drag), have each created characters involved in some way with the launch of a new line by Merlin, a fashion designer played by Simon Abkarian. The lighting's bright, the backdrop, one solid color for each character, brighter. Each addresses an unseen and unheard interviewer, Michelangelo, who listens a bit, cuts to the next brief soliloquy, and posts each day's worth of footage on his blog.

Might have made for a fine installation somewhere - ten, 15 minutes, tops. It might have even been received far more positively if it actually were posted as a series YouTube, one brief bit of these performers playing dress-up inside a comic book frame at a time, posted over a couple of weeks or so. Instead, Sally Potter decided to make it a feature. Which has entailed dreaming up a story; which has turned out to be a pretty ridiculous concoction: murder on the catwalk, mass protests... we don't see any of this; the actors must react, relate and emote.

The packed theater was half empty by the time Sunday's press screening was over. Not 15 minutes in, they started walking out in twos and threes and that's the way it went, all the way through. It almost became a running joke shared by the strangers on either side of me as we let them brush past our knees. There was an unspoken understanding that we weren't leaving, period, though if pressed, I'll bet none of us could have explained why.

'Rage' is an examination of the power of the internet and the age of compulsive confession; a warning shot at an info-saturated environment which confers power on cyber-savvy youngsters, leaving adults hostages of their own ignorance, and their desire to bare their souls," writes Catherine Shoard, who spoke with Potter and Judi Dench for the Guardian about a week ago.

It's "a tiresome 94 minutes," sighs Leslie Felperin in Variety. More from Lee Marshall in Screen ("amateurish and self-indulgent") and Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter: "[N]o matter how shallow, pretentious, self-regarding and irrelevant the fashion industry may be, there will always be a filmmaker who is more so."

[Photo: "Rage," Adventure Pictures Ltd, 2009]

Tags: Berlinale 2009, Jude Law, Judi Dench, Rage, Sally Potter, Simon Abkarian