This is a Festival review of The Look (2011)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 October
This is a Festival review of The Look (2011)
There is not much to say about The Look, not because it is not good, but because it is worth watching, rather than talking about. A good documentary cannot be summed up (and, counter to this sense, I had been trying to remember the headings under which each section of the film falls), but has told or, as here, shown you something about the truth.
Even if the viewer has somehow never heard of Charlotte Rampling, I believe that he or she, quite apart from the fact that clips are shown from a number of her films, would want to go on to discover some of them. (Where I know her best from is Woody Allen’s misunderstood (at the time) Stardust Memories, where she was mad and desirable as Dorrie, and the first time that I had heard the term ‘basket case’ (one of Alvy’s voices describing her.)
The sections were headed with titles as large, but not actually as invading, as exposure, beauty, sex, death, life and two or so others: each was the introduction to Rampling in communion with someone whom she know, so, first, being photographed by and photographing Peter Lindbergh in an unfinished / unfurnished top-floor space in what was probably Paris, talking about what that meant to her and to him. Already, a very great entrée into hearing what Rampling said about herself and her look. Then talking to writer Paul Auster in a remarkable maritime location, etc.
The film had really one flaw, which was that it dragged towards the end: the sections at the end could just have been a little tighter, because I was not alone in finding that the attention was slipping. Indeed, one short scene, where Rampling has something and nothing of meeting up with one of her contacts (after an atmospheric call from a deli to try to arrange it), could just have been dropped all together. The judgement seemed to have been taken to include it, when it might better have been made to leave it out.
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