Fascinating screen goddess suddenly resurfaces
(Now, March 14-21, 2001)

By Cameron Bailey

Charlotte Rampling directs a broad  smile at me and the photographer, but it doesn't help. In this instant, she's geometry. All I see are the celebrated planes of her face and her body -- abstracted by Woody Allen in Stardust Memories, and in that famous dance scene from The Night Porter where she's trisected by a pair of suspenders and nothing else.

This is what it means to be an icon.

She orders a coffee, "cream, no sugar," and becomes more normal, or at least more familiar. This is what stars do -- order coffee in hotel rooms in the flurry of the Toronto International Film Festival, and receive precisely what they want. It's a comforting action, for both of us.

But it's strange to see Rampling at all. Twenty-five years ago, she was the English face of remorseless art films. But after she married musician Jean Michel Jarre and set up house with three kids in a 14-bedroom Versailles mansion, the roles got smaller and sometimes harder to figure. I'm sure Rampling had good reasons for acting in The Ski Bum and Orca: The Killer Whale, but today's not the day I ask.

Now, out of the blue, she's touring to promote three films, including Jonathan Nossiter's impressive Signs & Wonders, a love story every bit as piercing and elusive as Rampling herself.

So where's she been lately?

"I'd done little pieces in Europe," she says, "and I'd done The Wings Of The Dove and a small part in Great Expectations."

She sips her coffee. "But I'd been quite quiet. Getting on with the terrors of living."

She breaks into a huge, strange laugh. I'm rattled.

But then again, Rampling's great genius, onscreen and in person, is to unsettle. Beauty aside, she's all brains and elbows.

It's a quality she can still use to devastating effect. In Signs & Wonders she returns to the husband who betrayed her (Stellan Skarsgrd) and seduces him with a composure that's positively animal.

Rampling has survived her own husband's betrayal -- and a much-publicized breakdown afterward -- but her enthusiasm for Signs & Wonders comes from the film's director.

"Jonathan is so much the film," she raves. "He's intensely passionate about everything. There's a courage there that I really loved. He's uncompromising."

Nossiter, like Rampling, is a traveller. He's an American raised in Europe, with a degree in ancient Greek and something no other filmmaker on the planet has -- two awards of excellence from Wine Spectator magazine.

"He's a sommelier!" Rampling laughs, "which is also delightful in your choice of directors, isn't it?"

Nossiter's wine lists for tony New York boites like Balthazar and Il Buco win him acclaim on the quaffing circuit. His last film, Sunday, won the top prize at Sundance.

He enjoys what he's called these "strange intersections of pleasure," a phrase that also fits Rampling's body of work.

But as much as she enjoys working, Rampling takes no pleasure in watching her films.

"I'm quite frankly embarrassed watching myself," she says quickly, "-- I mean deeply embarrassed, by everything I do."

This is way beyond false modesty. I'm surprised by her confession and I blurt out, "Why?"

"I don't know," she says. "I cringe."

And yet, "I think because it's the thing I fear most it's the thing I do best. I think fear, if it doesn't get too neurotic and out of control, is the motivator in our lives. And the thing I've always feared the most is being looked at."

Rampling worked on that fear in psychoanalysis, "and it's still there, but it's controllable."

Part of the price of being looked at is that the public gaze knows no boundaries. Rampling's dissolving marriage fed gossip in both Britain and France. When she had a nervous breakdown in 1991, it made the papers. The more she reacts to that public gaze, the stronger it gets. This is what it means to be an icon, especially an icon of beauty.

Rampling admits she's not always at home with her looks.

"It's very ambivalent," she begins, "because it's, it's something it's something you haven't earned, you've just got it.

"And it's something that allows you immense power. You can enter anywhere and you're immediately wanted, looked at, taken, dated, everything. You have great potential when you're very young and very beautiful. And instinctively, at a young age -- and quite violent things happened to me at a young age, too, which stopped me in my tracks -- I instinctively felt that it was a terrifying double-edged sword.

"Now I'm getting older," she continues, "and my so-called beauty will modify and be different. Then, when I look back at how I was when I was young, maybe I can enjoy it. It's sort of sad, isn't it?"

That same night at the film festival, I see Charlotte Rampling in a crowded restaurant. She stands, caught in the orbit of her handlers, like a woman drugged. She's a line drawing, a theory.

She looks through us all, and slowly she walks out over the crowd. She's a marvel. She is 55.