The role was written for Charlotte Rampling so it seems odd to say she's an inspired choice, since Ozon insists he wouldn't have made the movie without her. Rampling, who made her mark in Georgy Girl (1966) as Lynn Redgrave's selfish bitch of a roommate, doesn't have to shake off our memory of her as an ingenue. And while she was never the actress (Maggie Smith, Glenda Jackson, Vanessa Redgrave, Diana Rigg, Susannah York) or even the star (Julie Christie) that her fellow Englishwomen of that era were, she wasn't just a name brand (Jacqueline Bisset, Sarah Miles) either. She always presented a singularly disquieting-alluring image. Her generous upper lip gives her a default air of defensiveness but the about-to-pounce cat eyes warn you against projecting ordinary vulnerability onto her. She's so glassy-goddessy her vulnerability could only be devastating: she could be shattered but not hurt. Luckily for her the face has always been fascinating to the extent that she doesn't have much expertise in using it as an actress--it invites you to project onto it, dares you to, but doesn't give back.

In 1974 she had the bad luck, or good, depending on your taste for camp, to appear in two of the most derided films of the era: John Boorman's Zardoz, a science-fiction romance about breeding in the year 2293, and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, in which she plays a concentration camp survivor who engages in sexplay with Dirk Bogarde as her former captor. Rampling doesn't let go, doesn't open up, the way a natural actress does, but she doesn't pull back from the material either. (In this way she seems much more "French" to the Anglo-American mind than the actually half-French Bisset and it's practically an in-joke on Rampling's career that Sarah doesn't get off watching Julie.) When she does full frontal nudity in Swimming Pool you don't think of her feeling shame, though you feel Sarah would. Rampling, as a performer more image than identity (she shimmers, like the screen you're watching her on), enables you to accept when Sarah does things that momentarily seem out of character. Rampling's aura has always suggested perverse satisfaction without the capacity for simple enjoyment and now at last she brings it to a movie in which it's rooted in a believably-anatomized character.

The movie is also protected against Rampling's objective quality as an actress because the script explicitly dramatizes Sarah's interior life. Sarah is a construction pieced together from fragmentarily observed behavior, but you come to realize that the spareness of Ozon's means is a lure. His unblinking naturalism is only a devious simulacrum, the straight face that gives you misleading directions. (As Ozon says in this online press kit interview, "Speaking as a director, I wanted to show an imaginary world in as realistic a way as possible--flat--so that fantasy and reality are shown as equivalents.") Rampling, with her luminous presence, recessed personality, and gameness for anything, gives herself over to Sarah as written and that's perfect for Ozon's cool-toned, deceptively objective style. The pay-off when you start to get what the movie is up to is bigger than mere surprise.