Beyond the Multiplex

July 6, 2006 | I wasn't expecting Charlotte Rampling to be so sexy. That's an idiotic comment, I realize. We are talking, after all, about the woman who was the thinking-man's pinup girl of the 1970s, the woman who shaped the sexual aesthetic of an art-damaged generation, for better or worse, by portraying a former concentration-camp inmate embroiled in a kinky S/M relationship with her former Nazi torturer, played by the equally alluring Dirk Bogarde, in Liliana Cavani's 1974 "The Night Porter."

When I tell Rampling that I saw "The Night Porter" when I was young, and that it had a pronounced effect on me, she laughs and bows her head toward the hotel-room carpet and says, "Ye-e-es!" with a sharp, ironic exhalation of breath. It must be a strange thing to be an object of erotic fascination who has now grown older; Rampling has clearly heard remarks like that from a great many young and formerly young men, and what can she really say to us? The hunger for experience, for dark wisdom, for knowledge of forbidden things provoked by the 28-year-old Rampling in that film -- which probably wouldn't seem especially good or interesting or transgressive after all this time -- is not something she or anyone else could ever satisfy. We're stuck with it, and although it seems ungentlemanly to report this, Charlotte Rampling is now 60 years old and a grandmother.

If Rampling is no longer exactly the same enigmatic, melancholy beauty she was in those years -- the years not just of "The Night Porter" but of Visconti's "The Damned" and John Boorman's sci-fi camp classic "Zardoz" and playing Anne Boleyn in "Henry VIII and His Six Wives" and opposite Robert Mitchum in "Farewell, My Lovely" -- she remains a startling physical presence. When I enter her hotel room, she is in motion, gliding across the floor with a dancer's silent lightness, stretching, gathering her hair in one hand and letting it fall, extending the other for a firm handshake. She is wearing a man-style fitted white shirt and tailored black pants, which emphasize her lean, aristocratic frame. If she's put on so much as a pound in the last 30 years, you can't see it. She seems to be a woman very much aware of the power she possesses, and determined to enjoy it. She gives me one of her trademark half-smiles, the one that suggests some shared but unspoken understanding, arches an eyebrow and says, in that immediately recognizable contralto, "Charlotte. Please. Do. Come in."

Most of our conversation is serious talk about her career, especially her renewed recent career as the designated Sexy Older Woman of French cinema, first in the films of François Ozon ("Under the Sand" and "Swimming Pool") and now in Laurent Cantet's "Heading South," a provocative tale of sex tourism under the brutal Haitian dictatorship of the '70s. (Look for Stephanie Zacharek's review on Friday.) But Rampling is not above occasional flirtatious efforts to play to type. When the publicist fails to bring honey with Rampling's tea, as she had requested, she makes a great show of aggrievement, stirring the cup gravely and gracefully licking the spoon. After the publicist has left the room, she smiles as if to herself and says, "Well, I think she has been very bad. I think she should be punished. Don't you, Andrew? How do you think we should punish her?" Somehow the fact that she says all this without ever looking in my direction makes it much more effective. (She should do a series of videos: "How to Control the Minds of Men: Charlotte Rampling's Advice for Women.")

In "Heading South," Rampling plays Ellen, a professor of French at Wellesley who spends each summer at a private resort in Haiti where an array of beautiful, bemuscled black boys are available to the female clientele, mostly affluent single women in their 40s or older who have despaired of finding mates through more conventional means. Ellen is the queen bee of this establishment, assuring newcomers like Brenda (Karen Young) that this paradise is as beautiful as it seems, that it's share and share alike. She doesn't know that Brenda, a younger and more conventionally attractive woman, has a history with Legba (Ménothy Cesar), the handsome teenager Ellen has set aside as her private consort.

Depicting mature women who pay boys for sexual favors may be almost as shocking in 2006 as Rampling's film about a sadomasochistic love affair with a Nazi guard was 32 years ago. Throughout her career, Rampling has been drawn to challenging erotic subject matter, a fact she cautiously admits. "There are a lot of things that people still don't talk about, intimate things," she says. "Women certainly don't talk about them, not really, and I don't think men do either. I suppose there is something in me that is drawn to those things that aren't easily talked about."

Next page: "You don't know what goes on behind closed doors"