An unusual portrait of Charlotte Rampling

In The Look directed by Angelina Maccarone, to be presented at Cannes Classics, the British actress personally explores key issues in her life through eight chapters of dialogue with close friends.

With her playful beauty and deep green catlike eyes which give her that unique look of hers, Rampling is the icon to whom the German director of Italian origin, Angelina Maccarone, decided to dedicate a film. “Chosen as an “object of desire” in many of her films, Charlotte has, on each occasion, turned her character into the subject“, says Maccarone.

From Visconti to Ozon, not forgetting Chéreau and Woody Allen, Charlotte Rampling’s filmography is marked by genuine curiosity and determined avant-gardism. The actress certainly has plenty of pluck. She likes risks, extreme affairs and playing poisonous roles. Two perfect examples of this are Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) directed by Liliana Cavani in which she plays the role of an escaped inmate of a Nazi concentration camp who maintains a strange relationship with her former torturer, and Max mon amour (Max My Love) directed by Nagisa Oshima in which she falls in love with a chimpanzee.

The portrait that Angelina Maccarone paints of Rampling lies midway between a portrait and a self-portrait. Conceived with the actress, it is divided into eight main areas (taboos, desire, age, beauty, etc.), each of which is dealt with via a conversation between Charlotte Rampling and one of her close friends, all of them artists (for example, Peter Lindberg, Paul Auster and Jürgen Teller). Hence the film’s title, The Look, which is less of a reference to Lauren Bacall than it is to the director’s desire to show the world through the eyes of this sublime woman and actress.

The film will be screened on Sunday 15th May at 7:30 p.m. in the Salle du Soixantième.

B. de M.