Sally Potter (2009)
I’m glad it was after seeing the film that I read the interview with Sally Potter in the BFI programme note. Rage is a highly unusual viewing experience – fourteen characters, variously involved in a New York fashion show, are filmed by the unseen maker of the film, Michelangelo, on his mobile phone over a period of seven days. Until the closing moments, the entire picture comprises these interviews (and includes little camera movement); they are interspersed with the bits of text that Michelangelo composes to introduce each day’s footage. (We know from what we hear that he is young – we might assume this is some kind of student project.) The images (photographed by Steven Fierberg) are beautifully defined. The design is excellent – the changing colour of the backgrounds behind the talking heads (and their upper bodies), the costumes (by Marina Draghici), the make-up. (According to the credits, several of the actors had their own individual make-up artist.) Overall, the style of performance is highly effective – it’s definitely theatrical but the cast are strong enough to distil and express the essence of the people they’re playing – even though a fair number of the characters are written according to type (the flamboyant, up-himself designer, the anxiously affable PR man, the drily excoriating critic et al). But the inherent improbability of the set-up is an increasing problem and the film – which at 98 minutes is much too long – gets less and less interesting. The fashion show is overwhelmed by a sequence of horrific offscreen events, on and around the catwalk. From an early stage, we hear the sounds of protesters outside the building where the show is taking place and some of the dramatis personae are critical of the inhuman, exploitative ethos of the world of high fashion. As they reflect on the grim happenings, several turn increasingly penitent and politically correct. It’s evident from the BFI note that, in doing so, they become mouthpieces of the writer-director.
From the point at which the first death occurs (on day two), some of Michelangelo’s interviewees start getting jumpy about his filming them. Understandably so – although if Potter didn’t introduce this element you might be more likely to suspend disbelief and accept continuation of the filming as a comment on the characters’ need to be taken notice of, or to confide in someone, or both. Injecting a drop of realism into the situation, Potter draws attention to its unreality. By the time it emerges that Michelangelo is posting the interviews online and the combined forces of the show’s publicity people and the detective called in to investigate the deaths of two models aren’t happy about that, it’s ludicrous that Michelangelo is being allowed to carry on. There’s another fundamental problem with the script: once the fatalities begin, it seems clear where Rage is headed. Potter does nothing from this point on to surprise; nor do the horrors multiply in a way that might have turned the proceedings into black comedy. Potter puts the lid on them until the necessary top-of-the-bill carnage on the seventh day.
Watching Michelangelo’s composition of his introductory text is amusing (the title starts as ‘All the Rage’ and we hear his mind working in the pause before the first two words are deleted). And Potter has given her cast plenty of witty lines, although quite a few are too obviously sarcastic to be satisfying. Those who make a living in and on the periphery of the international fashion industry seem a rather easy target – so much so that Potter doesn’t need to elaborate on why people are protesting about the show. The audience can supply plenty of reasons: the distortion of beauty, the deification of image, the exploitation of cheap labour – all for the sake of profit. But reason not the need: Potter puts plenty of words in her characters’ mouths to explain where she’s coming from. I don’t have a problem with her inveighing against the mores of the creatures of the world of high fashion. I do think it’s a bit much when she says that ‘the issues could apply to people working in any high-pressure industry’ – without acknowledging that not many high-pressure industries would be capable of supplying stock characters as easily entertaining as these.
The satire is rarely thoughtful or imaginative but that makes you grateful for the rarities. Early on in the film, Miss Edith Roth (is the name a nod to Edith Head and Ann Roth?), whose firm makes the clothes on display in the show and who’s lived all her life in this world, tartly reminds us that what’s now known as the ‘fashion industry’ used to be called the ‘garment trade’ (a more honest description in her view). When things turn darker and we’re told that the celebrity designer Merlin, whose latest work is being launched at the show, is presenting ‘shrouds’, I took and liked this as a comment on his ability to turn anything to his self-promoting advantage (I may have misunderstood: it may be meant metaphorically rather than literally). But even though the politics of Rage are objectionably crude, Potter gets something much finer from her cast. Not all the performances are equally successful but every one is intelligent and skilful.
Simon Abkarian makes Merlin’s egotism enjoyably theatrical. Patrick J Adams is a callow blue-eyed-blond-haired adman, whose ideas are as obvious as his career advancement during the turbulent week is rapid. Bob Balaban gets demoted – the wages of relative sensitivity. Riz Ahmed is both likeable and disturbing as a young pizza delivery man eager for an even better job and whose motor bike plays a key role in the story. It was great seeing Adriana Barraza (marvellous in Babel) again: her emotional transparency allows Barraza to rise above the condescension implicit in her role as a Latina seamstress. Although the casting is a bit obvious, Steve Buscemi is as witty as ever as a photographer whose professional heartlessness doesn’t quite conceal his professional desperation. It’s clear that the Swedish actor Jakob Cedergren has a lot more to him than the weak part of the edgy PR man allows him to show; Eddie Izzard’s role as a financier is likewise too thin for him to be able to do much with. As Lettuce Leaf, a model, Lily Cole looks extraordinary (her face is being used to sell the film) and she acts well too. In her first appearances, Lettuce Leaf, with her doll-like face and hair, seems artificially constructed – so it’s particularly effective when Cole (she has the quality of a sexualised version of one of those children you see on Victorian scraps) starts showing emotion – when she’s crying, with smudged mascara, she begins to suggest a human being trapped in a body which can only be used for its commercial possibilities.
As Mona Carvell, the acerbic fashion journalist, Judi Dench is an absorbing camera subject although it’s a bit distracting that she sounds to be in two minds whether to bother trying an American accent: the critic’s eventual access of humanistic grief is such a dreary idea that it needs a Judi Dench to redeem it (which she just about does). As Minx, a transsexual model, Jude Law has one of the weaker roles – Potter loads the character with an explanation of the kind of personal backstory which belongs in a more conventional film. Law does well to be more convincing when he speaks in Minx’s real (American) voice than when he’s using her professionally faked Eastern European one – but the performance doesn’t quite work: there are effective moments but you keep catching looks at the camera which you can see are the actor’s. John Leguizamo has an underwritten role as the financier’s security man but David Oyelowo does very well as the detective, whose enthusiasm for Shakespeare (and propensity for quoting him) is one of the few surprises in Potter’s writing of the characters. Last but best of all is Dianne Wiest as Miss Roth. From the moment she appears, her squinched smiliness is accompanied by minute but unmissable intimations of terrible unease. When Miss Roth tells us she really wanted to be a lawyer or an academic but couldn’t desert her garment trader parents, Sally Potter is laying the ground for her finally joining the protest against her own company. But she doesn’t prepare us for how brilliantly Dianne Wiest conveys Miss Roth’s guilty delight at this act of rebellion.
14 October 2009
