Rage (2009)

Seven days, fourteen characters, a schoolboy and his website. An accident, a murder and a crisis in New York’s fashion industry. Broken dreams, bitter conflict and secret confessions: Sally Potter’s film is a tragicomedy about the effects of globalisation in the age of information. Over seven days, Michelangelo, a young blogger, shoots behind-the-scenes interviews on his cell-phone at a New York fashion house while Merlin, a designer of Middle-Eastern origin, prepares to show his latest collection. Interviews with a group of people including Minx (a celebrity supermodel), Tiny Diamonds (the financial backer), Anita de Los Angeles (a seamstress), Vijay (who delivers pizzas), Frank (a war photographer) and Mona Carvell (a critic), build a bitterly funny exposé of an industry in crisis as the effects of globalization and a faltering economy polarize working conditions and produce an ever-increasing gap between appearance and reality. Meanwhile Michelangelo becomes the person everyone turns to: when the death of a model on the runway becomes a murder investigation, the interviews become confessionals. A world which fetishises appearance over humanity turns upside down under the quiet gaze of a child armed only with the tools of his generation: the internet and the cell-phone.