Charlotte Rampling: The Look | Review

Charlotte Rampling is an actress of extraordinary depth, daring, mystery, beauty and turmoil, none of which qualities are particularly present or illuminated in the tiresome vanity project, Charlotte Rampling: The Look. Directed by Andrea Maccarone, this indulgent documentary jet-sets Rampling to different chic international locations for a series of disappointingly banal conversations with collaborators — including novelist Paul Auster and fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh — seemingly chosen more for their scheduling availability than their pertinence to Rampling’s life or career. Rampling’s brooding, even prickly attitude, so captivating in her films, is irksomely disingenuous in Maccarone’s “interviews”; no one, after all, is forcing her to do this. Rampling is a true actress in that there’s no real difference between what she is, and what she does. But the consequence of that peculiar dynamic is that what makes her great as an actress, makes her seem strangely false when playing herself.

Instead of taking a straightforward chronological approach to Rampling’s brilliant career, the movie is organized by fatuous thematic headings like “Exposure,” and “Resonance.” The movie fatally fails to realize that the value of great artists like Rampling is in what they inexplicably do, rather than in how they choose to explain it afterwards.

After an hour and a half of what at best is passable dinner conversation, and at worst pretentious folderol, one is briefly tempted to think less of Rampling as an actress. Then, a moment’s sane reflection sends temptation back down in the hole. Rampling is unique in her exploration of characters who straddle the boundary between elusive, self-destructive objects of desire, and desire’s aggressive agents. In ‘Swimming Pool,’ for instance, she and Ozon explicitly split these two impulses into separate characters: the aging, desperate mystery novel writer, and the conjured young blonde sex object (played by a just-budding Ludivine Sagnier). The dichotomy has eternally returned in Rampling’s performances: from the S&M power shifts in ‘The Night Porter,’ to the aggressive self-sabotage and seduction in ‘Stardust Memories,’ to the perverse defiance of chimp-woman love in Oshima’s ‘Max, My Love.’ Rampling naturally suggests a masculine-feminine woman, a conflicting composite of humanity. In other words — she’s a great fucking actress.

Rampling’ s acting exercises in Charlotte Rampling: The Look with her director son Barnaby Southcombe are peculiarly unrevealing; her interactions with average-Joe Parisian retirees in a park are forced and awkward. Have you ever wanted to watch Charlotte Rampling play foosball? You now have your chance.

There’s a lot of empty pontificating in this movie, so it’s unsurprising that writer Paul Auster offers the doc’s most intriguing conversation starter: “Has anyone over 80 ever written a great novel?” Rampling doesn’t have a clue; the question is dropped as soon as it’s offered. Like everything with this movie, it’s a great potential unexplored.

Rating 1.5 stars