Lord, I Was Boner Rampling Man, or, Visconti Python and the Holy Tail

[i.e., "Get a room"]

Charlotte Rampling

[4:15] John Cleese as Inspector Leopard of Scotland Yard, Special Fraud Film Director Squad ["Leopard of the Yard!" - Gallery.], reviewing the works of director Luchino Visconti in the “Fraud film squad” sketch:

…1969 saw ‘The Damned’, a Götterdämmerung epic of political and industrial shennanigans in good old Nazi Germany, starring Helmut Berger as a stinking transvestite what should have his face sawn off, the curvaceous Charlotte Rampling as a bit of tail, and the impeccable Dirk Bogarde as Von Essen. The association of the latter with Signor Visconti fructified with Dirk’s magnificent portrayal of the elderly poof what expires in Venice. And so, Yakomoto… blimey, he gone! Never mind. I’ll have you instead. (grabs the queen)…

La Rampling returned to consciousness from her usual spot 1/64 inch just beneath it, thanks to this vignette from Sunday’s NYTBR by science essayist Jim Holt, from a review of a new book on wine Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters by iconoclast documentarian Jonathan Nossiter*:

*Holt’s background lines adapted after Cleese’s Europhile film-crit Inspector Leopard above: “…2004 saw Mondovino, a subversive documentary about a wine world made up of power-mad wine critics and consultants, arriviste vintners, pretentious restaurateurs, greedy marketers and rich collectors with Americanized palates…”

He takes us on a scathingly opinionated tour of some of Paris’s most renowned restaurants and wine shops. We cheer him on as he picks an argument with the sommelier at the fashionable Atelier de Joël Robuchon, where, he is outraged to find, one of the new-style wines he deplores is priced at 803 euros (“The extra three euros seems deliriously arbitrary: a Gombrowiczian — or Duchampian — touch on top of a Marx Brothers gesture”). He ends up likening this would-be gastronomic temple to a Red Lobster.

As a restorative, Nossiter arranges a rendezvous with the radiant British actress (and longtime Parisian) Charlotte Rampling, who has appeared in one of his films. Together the two friends sip an honest Chablis at Le Dôme, an enduringly authentic Montparnasse fish restaurant cum literary hangout. “Charlotte, who is always surprising, fixes me with her beguilingly aqueous gaze,” he writes, eliciting in this reader a pang of jealousy.

• Моника Крус (Penelope Cruz) и Пенелопа Крус (Monica Cruz)