Judith Thurman in The New Yorker:
If you had an hour in a hotel suite, alone with Charlotte Rampling, to talk about sex, what would you ask her? For forty years, the British actress, whose name has become a verb (“to rample”—ensorcell with an enigmatic gaze) and the title of a rock song by Kinky Machine (“I always wanted to be your trampoline,” they sing to her), has specialized in fatally obsessed, perverse, smoldering, reckless, and unmoored women. She has played the survivor of a concentration camp who engages in sadomasochistic sex with her former torturer, in “The Night Porter”; a waifish “basket case,” in “Stardust Memories”; and a widow in pathological denial of her husband’s death—a probable suicide—in “Under the Sand.” “I generally don’t make films to entertain people,” Rampling said. “I choose the parts that challenge me to break through my own barriers. A need to devour, punish, humiliate, or surrender seems to be a primal part of human nature, and it’s certainly a big part of sex. To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness.”
More here.
