By Kiša Lala
Charlotte Rampling: photograph for SPREAD by Kareem Black, 2011
“Being ready at 9am in any country…” sighed Charlotte Rampling, smartly turned out in a black suit after a late night of revelry in the West Village. ‘The Look,’ had just premiered the night before in New York and Gabriel Byrne had popped out to greet her after the show. Byrne recalled how he’d sweated over how to impress her while on a first stroll through Central Park together, and seeing a night guardsman walk past, had quipped, “Ah, Night Porter!” Rampling had ignored his remark and had kept walking.
Later Byrne had asked, but wasn’t that funny?
“You don’t know how many fucking times people have said that to me,” Rampling had replied.
Paul Auster and Charlotte Rampling in a scene from Angelina Maccarone's documentary CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: THE LOOK. Credit: Kino Lorber/Les films d'ici
Charlotte Rampling’s films do not flash across neon-lit marquees in middle America, but her carefully culled oeuvre (“Sort of my artistic choice…a way of living, of evolving for me,” she tells me) has garnered a cult of swooning devotees who admire her courage in picking unconventional roles spanning four decades of cinema.
More prolific than ever, she has recently starred in Lemming, Swimming Pool, Heading South, playing conflicted, reclusive roles or evil, camp cameos, like in the sci fi flick Babylon A.D. She has also appeared in a Marc Jacobs fashion shoot, in an extended love fest with photographer Juergen Teller who played nude antics over a piano and gleefully peed into a flowerpot while Rampling, curled in bed, indulgently looked on. All the excavation and over-blown analysis into her enigma seems redundant when she is, more evidently, an artist committed to questing in life. While “The Look” is a bio-pic, featuring conversations with friends, it is tamer and less confrontational than past roles that explore darker aspects of her nature, revealing instead, a more contented side.
Charlotte Rampling photographed by Kareem Black, 2011 © Kareem Black
We share a couch near a lovely blazing fireplace at a lounge in Soho. I tell her that I wished she’d included a conversation with a younger woman, beautiful and successful as she had been when young, to create a tenser dynamic. Rampling fixes me with her hooded leopard gaze, “Hmm. I didn’t think of it…but it could have been good.” It was a bit early to talk about love, aging and mortality at breakfast, but I struggled to get past the platitudes.
KL: What about a crossover artist like Tilda Swinton?
CR: I don’t know her, though I’ve met her once. She’s certainly someone I would identify with; we are on the same sort of path. I feel in some ways she’s stronger than me, able to take on certain things I can’t take on.
KL: When you’re born beautiful you aren’t expected to do much more in life…
CR: It’s already enormous. What beauty brings is huge. It brings great privilege, great power and potential to do many things. If you are beautiful, doors open for you; people smile at you; you are accepted in places where others aren’t. So the relationship that people have with beauty, in a sense, is almost deforming.
