Posted on 09/12/2005 2:45:25 PM PDT by pissant
A FRENCH film has thrown a spotlight on the country’s latest cultural obsession by featuring Charlotte Rampling, the British star, in the role of a middle-aged sex tourist.
The film, Vers le Sud (Heading South), premiered last week at the Venice film festival where it received glowing reviews for its compassionate treatment of women escaping loveless lives to have sex with young men in the tropics.
It is certain to be well received in France, where a series of recent novels and magazine articles exploring the subject of women who pay for sex has taken the country’s well-documented taste for eroticism to new extremes.
The film tells the story of three wealthy American women who travel to Haiti in search of sun and fun just as the country begins its descent into anarchy at the end of the savage regime of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier in the 1980s.
“More than sex, these women are seeking a tenderness that the world is refusing them,” said Laurent Cantet, the director, who has been described as “the most exciting new figure in French cinema” and whose previous films include a drama about the consequences of France’s 35-hour week.
His latest film, which is based on a novel by a Haitian radio journalist, goes in a different direction. The trio of women in their fifties shower Haitian youths with gifts and money in return for sexual favours. Rampling plays Ellen, a veteran sex tourist from Boston, who ends up vying with her friends for the affections of Legba, the most attractive teenage gigolo in the resort.
“Legba represents a metaphor for Ellen,” said Rampling in Venice. “For a while she can dream that he represents all that is most beautiful in the world. This woman could have married, have had children, but she feels a form of desire which is not fulfilled either in her daily life or by her close acquaintances.”
Rampling has long made her home in France — she also has a property in London — and at 60 has come to embody the notion of graceful ageing. She has a reputation for enjoying offbeat, quirky roles and in two previous films — Under the Sand and Swimming Pool — she played women coming to terms with life on their own.
“These are roles which inspire something in me,” said Rampling, who went through a painful break-up with Jean Michel Jarre, the French composer, from whom she was divorced in 1996. “These are roles which appeal to me.”
The film reflects a French literary fad for stories about gigolos. Salamander, by Jean-Christophe Rufin, a luminary of the French literary world, tells the story of Catherine, a 46-year-old single woman who is invited to stay with a friend in Brazil but ends up in the embrace of Gil, a young black gigolo she meets on a beach in Recife. She falls in love with him and, in defiance of the advice of horrified friends and family, decides to sell her home in France to pursue a relationship with him in Brazil.
One reviewer called it “a beautiful love story” that reflected the loneliness of single women “of a certain age” in big French cities. “It reflects the need to have someone to love — and the lengths to which some people will go to find him.”
Pascal Bruckner, the essayist and philosopher, has taken up the theme in his latest book about a bored diplomat leading a double life as a male prostitute. The character decides to become a gigolo after discovering that it excites him when an older woman offers him money to have sex with her.
He rents a flat, puts an advertisement in a magazine and entertains an army of lonely single women before his depravity is exposed when one of them tips off his wife.
Nicole Avril pursues the subject in The Last Production, a novel about a woman who hires a gigolo for evenings of conversation before eventually agreeing to sex; and Josiane Balasko, a former stand-up comic, has written Client, about a woman and her gigolo.
The daughter of a British Army colonel, Rampling, who has two sons — one of them by Jarre — has given what one critic called a “haunting” performance in Heading South. As Ellen, she is a haughty, bossy woman who has nevertheless built up a close relationship with locals after numerous visits to Haiti in search of sex with young men.
Her rivals for the attention of Legba are Brenda, a masochistic Midwesterner, and the earthy Sue. “The hotel,” said Cantet, “is a small bubble where Americans come to forget the reality of their lives, which are filled with frustration, and rediscover their power of seduction. For Legba, the hotel is the only place he can go to escape the harsh reality of this country and find affection.”
He added: “The desire of women is not often talked about in cinema, especially those over 40. Here not only do we talk about it; we listen to the women themselves talk about it.”
Judging by the number of steamy affairs swirling around me when I worked at a large company, Americans aren't going to Haiti to find their seductive powers! ;o)
Or they come here to Las Vegas...
That last all of a few weeks, until he has to use your bathroom to take a growler!
I think a gal would have better luck in Vegas than Haiti!
Charlotte Rampling has occupied a small but interesting portion of my day dreams for years. Sadly, I doubt seriously that I play the same role for her.
Put an ad in a French paper....those gals could certainly use a few real men.
Haiti would not be on the top of my list. :(
Should I give you a list of good places??
I am single. Got the address for LeMonde classifieds?
Jeeves, here's a chance for you to earn some extra $$$
Sure, you know some?
Here's the links to their websites ad dept! Good luck.
http://company.wn.com/advertise.asp
In the market for men, women or something in between? LOL
Ok, now you're being silly! Men, all the way!
I didn't know you were a chick!!
Sure you didn't!
Anyone else get the idea they're very confused as to what "love" means?
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