READY, SET, RAMPLE.(The Talk of the Town)(Charlotte Rampling)(Interview)

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."

Rampling, who has lived in France since the early seventies and has become, in essence, a French movie star, was in New York to promote her latest film, "Heading South," directed by Laurent Cantet. In it, she plays Ellen, a brittle, sardonic fifty-five-year-old spinster (Rampling herself is sixty) who teaches French literature at Wellesley, and spends long summer vacations at a Haitian resort shacking up with a beautiful local beach boy named Legba. It is a story about sexual tourism--Legba is a gigolo--set under the squalid regime of Baby Doc Duvalier, and the hotel is a swingers' club, of sorts, for well-heeled white women. Ellen is their "queen bee," a gossip and a manipulator who pretends serenely that it costs her nothing to share Legba's favors with a harem. "None of the deeply disturbing characters I've played were as unnatural to me as this one," Rampling said. "I find it infuriating that a beautiful, smart woman like Ellen is--at any age--so invisible to the men of her own world that she has to pay."

Rampling was having a wraith's breakfast--an espresso and a glass of ...