Tag Archives: charlotte rampling

CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: THE NIGHT PORTER

Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) and Max (Dirk Bogarde) relive their Holocaust experience in THE NIGHT PORTER

WEEKEND CLASSICS: THE NIGHT PORTER (Liliana Cavani, 1974)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
February 5-7, 11:00 am
Series runs through March 6
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Disgraceful Nazi porn or searing allegory about the devastating after-effects of the Holocaust on victims as well as Europe as a whole? Lurid exploitation or sensitively drawn, poignant exploration of a severe case of Stockholm syndrome? You can decide for yourself when Liliana Cavani’s ever-so-kinky, extremely controversial 1974 drama, The Night Porter, screens at the very strange time of eleven o’clock in the morning February 5-7 as part of the IFC Center’s eight-film tribute to Charlotte Rampling, being held on the occasion of the release of her latest movie, 45 Years, which has earned the British actress, model, and singer her first Oscar nomination. Rampling is downright frightening as Lucia, a young woman who was tortured as a sex slave by SS officer Maximilian Theo Aldorfer (Dirk Bogarde) in a Nazi concentration camp. It’s now 1957, and Lucia has arrived in Vienna with her husband (Marino Masé), a prominent American conductor. Lucia and Max, who is the night porter at the fashionable Hotel zur Oper, instantly recognize each other, and the moment hangs in the air, neither sure what the other will do. They say nothing, and soon the two of them have seemingly journeyed back to the camp, involved in a dangerous descent into sex and violence behind closed doors. But a small group of Max’s Nazi friends, including Klaus (Philippe Leroy), Hans Folger (Gabriele Ferzetti), and Stumm (Giuseppe Addobbati), who have dedicated themselves to destroying documents — and witnesses — as former members of the SS are brought to trial, become suspicious of Max’s bizarre relationship with Lucia, who could make trouble for them all.

THE NIGHT PORTER is part of eight-film Charlotte Rampling tribute at IFC Center

Cavani (The Berlin Affair, Ripley’s Game), er, takes no prisoners in The Night Porter, holding nothing back as Max and Lucia grow closer and closer, eventually isolating themselves from the rest of the world. Rampling plays Lucia like a caged animal, her penetrating eyes bathed in mystery; we never know what she’s going to do next, and still we’re continually shocked by her actions. Bogarde plays Max with a grim elegance; he believes that he truly loves Lucia, and that she loves him. He uses his body, and especially his hands, with an eerie grace that is both complicated and scary. The film is very much about performance and voyeurism, about the relationship between creator, performer, and audience. When Max first sees Lucia in the concentration camp, he is instantly taken with her, and he begins filming her with his camera. In one of the movie’s most provocative and titillating scenes, Max and other Nazis watch the young Lucia, wearing an SS outfit but with only suspenders on top, sing “Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte” (“If I Could Wish for Something”), a German song made famous by Marlene Dietrich (and originally written by Friedrich Hollaender for the 1931 film The Man in Search of His Murderer). It’s a mesmerizing few minutes that takes the sadomasochism to a whole new psychological level. Max is also still taking care of Bert (Amedeo Amodio), another survivor who has been dancing for Max and other SS officers since the war. So it is not surprising that Lucia has married a conductor, a man with the power to control others. The film has holes you can drive a Panzer through, but it’s impossible to take your eyes off of Rampling (Georgy Girl, Stardust Memories, The Verdict), who will turn seventy on February 5, and Bogarde (The Servant, Darling, Death in Venice), two beautiful actors locked in a grotesque game of cat and mouse. The Rampling series continues at IFC through March 6 with Heading South, Under the Sand, The Cherry Orchard, and Farewell, My Lovely.

LHOMME BEHIND THE CAMERA: THE FLESH OF THE ORCHID

Charlotte Rampling is on the run in THE FLESH OF THE ORCHID

CinéSalon: THE FLESH OF THE ORCHID (LA CHAIR DE L’ORCHIDÉE) (Patrice Chéreau, 1975)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, January 26, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 23
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

French stage and opera director Patrice Chéreau made an offbeat choice for his debut film, deciding to adapt British thriller writer James Hadley Chase’s The Flesh of the Orchid, the 1948 sequel to his first novel, 1939’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which had been made into a 1948 film by St. John Legh Clowes considered to be one of the worst movies ever. So it’s little surprise that The Flesh of the Orchid is a dark and gloomy, not wholly successful, both tantalizing and frustrating tale of lust and greed. Following up her controversial role in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, the exquisite Charlotte Rampling stars as Claire, a mentally unbalanced heiress who has a penchant for blinding men who attempt to have sex with her. But she takes an odd liking to Louis Delage (Bruno Cremer), a man with financial problems who is on the run after witnessing a murder committed by a pair of cold-blooded killers, brothers Gyula and Joszef Berekian (Hans Christian Blech and François Simon). Meanwhile, Claire’s aunt, the elegant, très chic Madame Wegener (Edwige Feuillère), and her ne’er-do-well son, Arnaud (Rémy Germain), are hot on her trail as well, determined to lock her away again so they can get their hands on the family money.

flesh of the orchid

Adapted by Chereau and Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist Jean-Claude Carrière (Heureux Anniversaire, Belle de Jour), The Flesh of the Orchid is a peculiar, dreary mystery that is made palatable by Rampling’s mesmerizing performance, her dark, penetrating eyes offering an intriguing counterpoint to what her character likes to do to men’s faces, and Pierre Lhomme’s César-nominated cinematography, which uses water as a major theme and incorporates clever shots of windows and mirrors to heighten psychological tension. The back story involving Oscar winner Simone Signoret (Les diaboliques, Room at the Top) is never fully realized, while a cameo by Alida Valli (The Third Man, The Paradine Case) is simply baffling, unless it’s a strange reference to Georges Franju’s 1960 horror classic Eyes without a Face, in which Valli plays an assistant to a doctor trying to rebuild his daughter’s face after a terrible accident. And yes, that is Mr. Slugworth himself, Günter Meisner, as Madame Wegener’s trusted right-hand man. Chereau would go on to make such films as Queen Margot, Intimacy, and Persécution before passing away in 2013 at the age of sixty-eight. The Flesh of the Orchid is screening at Florence Gould Hall on January 26 at 4:00 and 7:30 in FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Lhomme Behind the Camera,” a tribute to the eighty-five-year-old award-winning French cinematographer who shot more than sixty films, working with such directors as Joris Ivens, William Klein, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, Jean Eustache, Benoît Jacquot, Marguerite Duras, Dusan Makavejev, Claude Miller, and Claude Berri. The 7:30 show will be introduced by documentary director and cinematographer Frédéric Tcheng (Dior and I, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel). The series continues through February 23 with such other Lhomme-lensed films as James Ivory’s Maurice, which will be followed by a Q&A with Lhomme and Ivory; Alain Cavalier’s Le Combat dans l’île; Chris Marker and Lhomme’s Le Joli Mai; and Jean-Paul Rappenau’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

Roy Dupuis plays a heroic woodsman in Guy Maddin and Evan Johnsons unpredictably strange and wonderful homage to early cinema, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

Roy Dupuis plays a heroic woodsman in Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s unpredictably strange and wonderful homage to lost early cinema, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson, 2015)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
October 7-20
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
theforbiddenroom-film.com

Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room is a deliriously mesmerizing epic tone poem, a crafty, complex avant-garde ode to cinema as memory, and memory as cinema. An homage to the lost films of the silent era, it is the illegitimate child of Bill Morrison and David Lynch, of Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger, of D. W. Griffith and Josef von Sternberg. The impossible-to-describe narrative jumps from genre to genre, from submarine thriller to Western adventure to murder yarn, from romantic melodrama and crime story to war movie and horror tale, complete with cannibals, vampires, poisoned leotards, “valcano” eruptions, caged lunatics, butt obsession, squid theft, explosive jelly, a fantastical mustache, and skeletal insurance defrauders. Intertitles that often fade away too soon to decipher help propel the plot, contain lines from John Ashbery and the Bible, and blast out such words as “Deliverer of Doom,” “Diablesa!” and “Trapped!” Text in intricate fonts announces each new character and actor, including Maddin regular Louis Negin as the Sacrifice Organizer, Slimane Dazi as shed-sleeper and pillow-hugger Baron Pappenheim, Lewis Furey as the Skull-Faced Man, and Roy Dupuis as a “mysterious woodsman” determined to rescue captured amnesiac Margot (Clara Furey) from the evil clutches of the Red Wolves. Also involved in the bizarre festivities are Udo Kier, Geraldine Chaplin, Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Rampling, and Maria de Medeiros.

Although shot digitally, the film explores photographic emulsion and time-ravaged nitrate while treating celluloid as an art object unto itself, looking like Maddin (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, My Winnipeg) and Johnson stomped on, burned, tore up, and put back together the nonexistent physical filmstrip. Thus, major kudos are also due Maddin’s longtime editor, John Gurdebeke, and music composers Galen Johnson, Jason Staczek, and Maddin himself for keeping it all moving forward so beautifully. The film was photographed by Benjamin Kasulke and Stéphanie Anne Weber Biron in alternating scenes of black-and-white, lurid, muted color, and sepia tones that offer constant surprises. The Forbidden Room might be about the magic of the movies, but it is also about myth and ritual, dreams and fantasy as it explores storytelling as psychodrama. Oh, and it’s also about taking baths, as Marv (Negin) so eagerly explains throughout the film. But most of all, The Forbidden Room is great fun, a truly unpredictable and original work of art that is a treat for cinephiles and moviegoers everywhere. Following its recent screenings at the New York Film Festival, The Forbidden Room is opening theatrically on October 7 at Film Forum, with Maddin present on October 12 for a Q&A after the 7:00 show (moderated by Jonathan Marlow) and to introduce the 9:30 show.

NYFF53 MAIN SLATE: THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

Roy Dupuis plays a heroic woodsman in Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s unpredictably strange and wonderful homage to lost early cinema, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson, 2015)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Monday, September 28, 9:00, and Tuesday, September 29, 8:30
Festival runs through October 11
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
theforbiddenroom-film.com

Although shot digitally, the film explores photographic emulsion and time-ravaged nitrate while treating celluloid as an art object unto itself, looking like Maddin (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, My Winnipeg) and Johnson stomped on, burned, tore up, and put back together the nonexistent physical filmstrip. Thus, major kudos are also due Maddin’s longtime editor, John Gurdebeke, and music composers Galen Johnson, Jason Staczek, and Maddin himself for keeping it all moving forward so beautifully. The film was photographed by Benjamin Kasulke and Stéphanie Anne Weber Biron in alternating scenes of black-and-white, lurid, muted color, and sepia tones that offer constant surprises. The Forbidden Room might be about the magic of the movies, but it is also about myth and ritual, dreams and fantasy as it explores storytelling as psychodrama. Oh, and it’s also about taking baths, as Marv (Negin) so eagerly explains throughout the film. But most of all, The Forbidden Room is great fun, a truly unpredictable and original work of art that is a treat for cinephiles and moviegoers everywhere. The Forbidden Room is screening at the New York Film Festival on September 28 at 9:00 and September 29 at 8:30, with Maddin and Johnson in person at the Walter Reade Theater. In addition, their thirty-one-minute documentary short, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, a behind-the-scenes account of the making of Paul Gross’s Afghanistan war movie, Hyena Road, is being shown both days (12 noon – 6:00; 8:30 – 11:00) for free at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Amphitheater across the street.

JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIERE — WRITING THE IMPOSSIBLE: MAX, MON AMOUR

Married mother Margaret Jones (Charlotte Rampling) is madly in love with a monkey in Nagisa Ôshima’s surprisingly tame MAX, MON AMOUR

CinéSalon: MAX, MON AMOUR (Nagisa Ôshima, 1986)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, July 7, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through July 28
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

It’s rather hard to tell how much Japanese auteur Nagisa Ôshima is monkeying around with his very strange 1986 movie, Max, Mon Amour, a love story between an intelligent, beautiful woman and a chimpanzee. The director of such powerful films as Cruel Story of Youth; Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; Taboo; and In the Realm of the Senses seems to have lost his own senses with this surprisingly straightforward, tame tale of bestiality, a collaboration with master cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who shot seminal works by Truffaut and Godard; screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who has written or cowritten nearly ninety films by such directors as Pierre Étaix (who plays the detective in Max), Luis Buñuel, Volker Schlöndorff, Philippe Garrel, and Miloš Forman; and special effects and makeup artist extraordinaire Rick Baker, the mastermind behind the 1976 King Kong, the Michael Jackson video Thriller, Ratboy, Hellboy, and An American Werewolf in London, among many others. Evoking Bedtime for Bonzo and Ed more than Planet of the Apes and Gorillas in the Mist, Max, Mon Amour is about a well-to-do English family living in Paris whose lives undergo a rather radical change when husband Peter Jones (Anthony Higgins) catches his elegant wife, Margaret (Charlotte Rampling), in bed with a chimp. Margaret insists that she and the chimp, Max, are madly in love and somehow convinces Peter to let her bring the sensitive yet dangerous beast home, which confuses their son, Nelson (Christopher Hovik), and causes their maid, Maria (Victoria Abril), to break out in ugly rashes. Peter, a diplomat, works for the queen of England, so as he prepares for a royal visit to Paris, he also has to deal with this new addition to his ever-more-dysfunctional family.

Throughout the film, it’s almost impossible to figure out when Ôshima is being serious, when he is being ironic, when he is trying to make a metaphorical point about evolution, or when he is commenting on the state of contemporary aristocratic European society. When Margaret puts on a fur coat, is that a reference to her hypocrisy? Is her affair with a zoo animal being directly compared to Peter’s dalliance with his assistant Camille (Diana Quick)? Even better, is Ôshima relating Max to Her Royal Highness? We are all mammals, after all. Or are Ôshima and Carrière merely riffing on Buñuel’s 1972 surrealist classic The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which Carrière cowrote? Perhaps Max, Mon Amour is about all of that, or maybe none of it, as Ôshima lays it all out very plainly, as if it is not a completely crazy thing that a woman can have an affair with a chimp and have him become part of the family. Regardless, the film is just plain silly, although it looks pretty great, particularly Rampling wearing gorgeous outfits and a Princess Di do and Quick in hysterically hideous haute couture gone terribly wrong. Meanwhile, Michel Portal’s score mines Laurie Anderson territory. You can decide for yourself whether Max, Mon Amour is a misunderstood masterpiece or an absurd piece of trifle when it is shown on July 7 in the French Institute Alliance Française’s CinéSalon series “Jean-Claude Carrière: Writing the Impossible.” (The 7:30 show will be introduced by Japan Society film programmer Kazu Watanabe, who will attempt to shed more light on this, and both the 4:00 and 7:30 shows will be followed by a wine reception.) The two-month festival consists of a wide range of films written by two-time Oscar winner Carrière, who, at eighty-three, is still hard at work. The series continues through July 28 with such other Carrière collaborations as Andrzej Wajda’s Danton, Louis Malle’s May Fools, and Jonathan Glazer’s Birth.

RECITAL SERIES: THE NIGHT DANCES

Who: Charlotte Rampling and Sonia Wieder-Atherton
What: Recital Series: The Night Dances
Where: Park Avenue Armory, Board of Officers Room, 643 Park Ave. at 67th St., 212-933-5812
When: April 22-26, $75
Why: New York City’s most diverse and captivating space, the Park Avenue Armory, will host the U.S. premiere of “Recital Series: The Night Dances,” what should be a mesmerizing performance that features the one and only Charlotte Rampling (The Night Porter, Swimming Pool) reading the poetry of Sylvia Plath, accompanied by cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton (Little Girl Blue, from Nina Simone; Vita Monteverdi Scelsi) playing suites by Benjamin Britten.

THE ART OF SEX AND SEDUCTION: SWIMMING POOL

Jealousy and envy are at the heart of François Ozon’s sexy thriller

CINÉSALON: SWIMMING POOL (François Ozon, 2003)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 18, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 16
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
www.focusfeatures.com

Charlotte Rampling is divine in François Ozon’s playfully creepy mystery about a popular British crime novelist taking a break from the big city (London) to recapture her muse at her publisher’s French villa, only to be interrupted by the publisher’s hot-to-trot teenage daughter. Rampling stars as Sarah Morton, a fiftysomething novelist who is jealous of the attention being poured on young writer Terry Long (Sebastian Harcombe) by her longtime publisher, John Bosload (Game of Thrones’s Charles Dance). John sends Sarah off to his elegant country house, where she sets out to complete her next Inspector Dorwell novel in peace and quiet. But the prim and proper — and rather bitter and cynical — Sarah’s working vacation is soon intruded upon by Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), John’s teenage daughter, who likes walking around topless and living life to the fullest, clearly enjoying how Sarah looks at her and judges her. “You’re just a frustrated English writer who writes about dirty things but never does them,” Julie says, and soon Sarah is reevaluating the choices she’s made in her own life. Rampling, who mixes sexuality with a heart-wrenching vulnerability like no other actress (see The Night Porter, The Verdict, and Heading South), more than holds her own as the primpy old maid in the shadow of a young beauty, even tossing in some of nudity to show that she still has it. (Rampling has also posed nude in her sixties in a series of photographs by Juergen Teller alongside twentysomething model Raquel Zimmerman, so such “competition” is nothing to her.)

Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Sarah (Charlotte Rampling) come to a kind of understanding in François Ozon’s SWIMMING POOL

Rampling has really found her groove working with Ozon, having appeared in four of his films, highlighted by a devastating performance in Under the Sand as a wife dealing with the sudden disappearance of her husband. Sagnier, who has also starred in Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women, is a delight to watch, especially as things turn dark. Swimming Pool is very much about duality; the film opens with a shot of the shimmering Thames river while the title comes onscreen and Philippe Rombi’s score of mystery and danger plays, and later Sarah says, “I absolutely loathe swimming pools,” to which Julie responds, “Pools are boring; there’s no excitement, no feeling of infinity. It’s just a big bathtub.” (“It’s more like a cesspool of living bacteria,” Sarah adds.) Ozon (Time to Leave, Criminal Lovers) explores most of the seven deadly sins as Sarah and Julie get to know each other all too well. Swimming Pool is being shown November 18 at 4:00 and 7:30 as part of the French Institute Alliance Française CinéSalon series “The Art of Sex and Seduction,” with the later screening introduced by filmmaker Ry Russo-Young and followed by a wine reception; the series continues Tuesdays through December 16 with Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake introduced by Alan Brown, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress introduced by Melissa Anderson, and François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women introduced by Laura Kipnis, all complemented by Jean-Daniel Lorieux’s “Seducing the Lens” photography exhibition.