Berlinale 2019: ‘Max mon amour’
By Alex Deleon
Charlotte Rampling in the Festival Spotlight
The first film seen at the festival in the homage to Charlotte Rampling retro was somewhat of a disappointment. I had seen this picture when it first came out in Japan and was favorably impressed at the time by its outrageous sense of the absurd, especially as made by a serious A level Japanese director like Nagisa Oshima (died 2013 at age 80). This time around the humor, at least for me, did not hold up and I was rather bored most of the way.
Today it is of little more than passing historical interest
There is, however, an interesting background to this very offbeat Franco-Japanese co-production from the year 1986 by which timeNagisa Ôshima was regarded as a first class Japanese iconoclast. Outside of Japan he was highly regarded in France where his mainstream hardcore porno films In the realm of the Senses (1976) and Empire of Passion (1978j were screened at Cannes and had created a sensation.
His next Cannes entry 1983, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, about a Japanese POW camp in WW II took the Grand Prix at Cannes and firmly established Oshima’s reputation in France. French producer
Serge Silberman who was a long term backer of controversial Buñuel films and selected Japanese films helped set up Oshima’s first and only French language piece starring Charlotte Rampling an outstanding British actress fluent in French. With a script written by Oshima (and Jean Claude Carrière) this film was his bid to gain wider general acceptance and it almost worked. It certainly earned him a bit of notoriety if not much else.
The film itself is based on the absurd premise that the elegant bored wife (Rampling) of a handsome diplomat (Anthony Higgins) falls in love with a zoo chimpanzee, buys him from the zoo, and sets him up in an apartment as her regular lover. Higgins plays her blasé diplomat husband who invites the ape to live with them in their ultra fancy Paris pad in a most sophisticated menage à trois. Talk about broad mindedness! Higgins himself is carrying on an extramarital affair so this ridiculous film might be interpreted as a wry comment on so called open marriages. The problem is that although played for straight faced laughs it isn’t really very funny, mainly because the fake chimpanzee simply doesn’t have the charm of Tarzan’s real chimpanzee pet Cheetah and just bungles around disjointedly. The end result is a classy looking piece of self indulgent self mockery that fails to hit the marks intended. Almost fun to watch anyway simply for its unabashed absurdity, but John Waters it isn’t. (Though it might have been really funny if made with Divine).
Other Rampling classics coming up include The Night Porter (Caviani, 1974), The Damned (Visconti, 1969) and Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980).
Charlotte Rampling’s body of work comprises more than 100 films and television appearances. At the 69th Berlin International Film Festival, she was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement. She had her international breakthrough with Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) in 1974. Among the highlights of her film career are La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969), Stardust Memories (1980), and Swimming Pool (2003), for which she won the European Film Award for Best Actress. Charlotte Rampling often plays complex, unconventional characters who, as she says, she always brings to the screen with “emotional truth”. Charlotte Rampling sits down with film historian Peter Cowie to talk about milestones in her career.
