Published 9/17/2003
Flagpole Magazine

Director François Ozon says of Charlotte Rampling, the focus of his new film Swimming Pool and his 2000 work Under the Sand, "Charlotte makes a confusion between reality and fantasy." ("A Time for Happiness," The Guardian, Aug. 16, 2003) On this confusion, Ozon has created two films that are mirror-image opposites of each other and which also reflect a secret, only recently revealed, that has shaped Rampling's life. By the time in Swimming Pool that she begins that expansive wave, this simple gesture has taken on so many levels of meaning that it is both joyous and chilling. If you truly understand what is happening on the screen in these films, your head will spin.

To know fully these two films you need to know Rampling's secret. Charlotte was the younger of two sisters. Her sister Sarah was, in Rampling's words, "prettier, more glamorous. I was a bit more ordinary. Her chaperone, really." To establish her own individuality Charlotte flirted with danger in her personal life and became the epitome of the swinging Londoner of the 1960s with such films as Georgy Girl (1966).

All this changed in 1966 when she was told by her father that Sarah had died of brain hemorrhage not long after giving birth to a premature son. Only in 1969 did Charlotte's father tell her the truth, that Sarah had committed suicide by shooting herself. Charlotte and her father made a pact that her mother would never know.

Perhaps sensing the truth kept from her, Charlotte's mother had a stroke soon after Sarah's death and stopped speaking. The remainder of her life was "various stages of staggering grief." She remained motionless in a chair her last nine years, her hands grasping the arms like the claws of a little bird, dying in 2001.

After learning the truth in 1969, Charlotte abandoned her personal danger-seeking. She was now the only child and focused her sense of provocation on her work, which now featured fetishism, sadomasochism and decadence in such films as Visconti's The Night Porter (1974). For all her sensationalism, Charlotte's acting lacked self-transcendence as she admitted. "What I am doing is not acting. I am simply playing myself." These roles along with distance and coolness have, up until her collaboration with Ozon, shaped her public image.

During this time she gave interviews creating the fiction that she had the perfect life. In 1984, she began to seek treatment for depression. In 1995, her marriage to composer Jean Michel Jarre ended when he was seen checking into a Paris hotel with a young woman.

When she met Ozon her career took a new direction. Ozon was only 32 at the time but already had an interest in fantasy and reality. This fascination was evident in Sitcom (1998) where the outward appearance of family masked a bizarre reality. He had shown in his other movies a sensitivity to image, whether with the evocative use of mirrors or with photography. Charlotte Rampling had decades of experience with secrets: she had an image which masked a reality. She was a perfect subject for Ozon.

For Rampling, the collaboration has also been magic. Under the Sand, in Ozon's words, had brought her "a kind of rebirth." After a fallow period she was once again in demand and in the opinion of interviewers was happy. But Ozon realized that there was more potential in their collaboration. "I realized that if I asked her to do something ordinary, like Sarah (Morton, the main character in Swimming Pool) that it would be magic with her." Perhaps Ozon also thought it was time for art to follow life with a film about the kind of rebirth that Rampling was experiencing in real life. He did this by creating in Swimming Pool the mirror-opposite of Under the Sand.

Sarah Morton (Swimming Pool) goes to the country to regain inspiration. Jean and Marie (the married couple featured in Under the Sand with Rampling as Marie) go to their country house for a vacation.

Sarah's work is interrupted by the arrival of Julie, the daughter of Sarah's publisher. Jean and Marie's vacation is interrupted by the disappearance of Jean, who goes swimming and never returns.

Sarah Morton fearlessly focuses outward on Julie and is rewarded with a burst of creativity. Not insular, she visits de Sade's castle and recalls swinging London. By contrast, Marie collapses inward in fear, secrets, regrets and denial: heading for mental collapse.

Marie continues her routine, which includes the missing Jean who still appears to her, converses with her and even sees her make love. Sarah becomes fascinated by the changes of her routine brought about by the sybaritic Julie.

Marie, the character most like Rampling in real life, disappears into insanity; Sarah, unlike Rampling, achieves liberation. By fracturing her image as if in multiple mirrors, she (Rampling, Morton) is free. "I am not the person you think I am." Charlotte Rampling now acts!

The mirror endings are chilling, evocative and superbly balanced.

Marie (Under the Sand) returns to the site of Jean's disappearance. On a gray windswept day, she weeps and begins clawing the sand, perhaps with the same claw hands with which Rampling's mother held so desperately to the arms of her chair. Finding only more sand, she withers under the weight of sorrow and secrets. Noticing a man along the beach she runs toward him. Running but not seeming to advance, she appears trapped in her own shrinking world.

Sarah (Swimming Pool) stands on the balcony awash in the light of lucidity and resplendent in a red robe of passion. With a wave she pays tribute to Julie, whose appetites for life liberated her and who perhaps represents the '60s wild child Rampling once was. She waves across time to a happy innocent, perhaps representing Rampling's own sister Sarah, whom she now welcomes back into her life after being buried under the sand for so many decades. Rampling and Morton are reborn into an open world.

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