Charlotte Rampling: Summer loving

There can be few things more ghastly than the English masses on holiday - apart, perhaps, from the French on holiday. Joseph Connolly's mordant comic novel Summer Things observed a group of mismatched British couples as they eagerly converged on a seaside resort for the vacation from hell. Michel Blanc's film version, with the same title, ferries the action across the Channel to set it in the smart resort of Le Touquet, a town at once very English and relentlessly French. Little of the bile seems to have been lost in translation: in the story's whirligig of class snobbery, sexual infidelity and excess, mistaken identity and people diving in and out of doors, Blanc finds all the qualities of a perfect Feydeau farce.

"Summer Things is more about sex than about love," argues Lou Doillon, who plays a promiscuous teenager. "Many of the characters lose themselves in what they think is love but what in fact is sex. What I like is that the film shows lots of different kinds of couples and styles, and in all those examples, love is not easy, whether you're a teenager or an old person or a homosexual or with an older or a younger guy. It is a nightmare, whatever happens."

The story follows a dozen or so characters. One wealthy family plans a break at a luxury hotel, pressuring another couple to accompany them. Their friends, however, are stony broke and, unwilling to admit it, secretly check into a trailer park. A single mother falls prey to a professional seducer; another woman is hounded and spied on by her morbidly jealous husband (played by Blanc). A transsexual, a love-lorn youth and assorted other misfits complete the set.

"Michel Blanc is a great Anglophile. A certain side of the English nature suits his personality," says Charlotte Rampling, who plays Doillon's mother, a quintessential lady-who-lunches who discovers unpalatable truths about her husband and herself. Indeed, Blanc adapted David Hare's The Blue Room for the Paris stage, while his previous film, The Escort, shot in English and co-scripted by Hanif Kureishi, starred Daniel Auteuil as a French professor of literature who goes to live in London and ends up becoming a gigolo.

However, Rampling herself is the film's strongest British connection. After making an early splash in a few Swinging London comedies, including The Knack and Georgy Girl, she left for the Continent and has lived there ever since. "There was something about my Englishness that was pulling me into an area I didn't want to go into," she says. "I just felt hemmed in. And I found in Italy, as a lot of English girls do, everything I didn't have at home. Light and love and beauty and weather."

Paradoxically, the roles Rampling attracted there were often on the sombre side - she's still most closely identified with gloomy psychosexual fare such as The Night Porter and Twilight of the Gods. After a difficult period in her life and career, triggered by severe depression and the end of her 20-year relationship with the musician Jean Michel Jarre, Rampling made a spectacular comeback three years ago in François Ozon's Under the Sand. Her performance in this brooding portrait of a woman unable to accept her husband's disappearance convinced Blanc, he says, to cast the actress in his own film.

"Summer Things reconciled me with the funny side of myself - a side I've kept hidden for a long time," says Rampling, 58. "I could play with a character in a way I've never done before. The book is a caustic vision, and when I read the screenplay I found her a rather futile, empty woman. But she ends up discovering her own worth and knowing a lot more than she thought she did. Which is often the case with people."

Carole Bouquet is the other female lead, the hapless wife of Blanc's character. She is one of France's most noted beauties - the face of Chanel No 5 for 15 years - and has proved herself a polished comedienne, winning a César in 1990 for her performance in Bertrand Blier's Trop Belle Pour Toi, as the exquisite wife ditched by Gérard Depardieu for his frumpy secretary.

"I'm 45 and, at that age, you no longer make a film based on beauty alone, as you would when you were 20. You get older, but you have more interesting stories to tell," says Bouquet, who also appeared opposite Blanc in one of his earlier comedies, Dead Tired, about a film star plagued by the antics of a mischief-making double. "I found Summer Things, like all Michel's films, very funny and at the same time very true. He has that knack of saying things that are weighty, serious and dramatic in a light way. It's an extraordinary quality to be able to make you laugh at terrible things and put them in perspective. I love his mixture of cruelty and immense tenderness."

Summer Things was a substantial hit in France last year. But its jaundiced view of human follies and relations between the sexes was not to every taste, and when French critics reached for phrases such as "misanthropic vinegar" (Le Monde) or "acerbic and cruel" (Le Figaro), they were not always meant as compliments. Still, Connolly is hardly famed as the kindest, gentlest of writers, and Blanc maintains that the novel is much more cynical than his film. "Its characters are like trapped insects. I don't see life that way," the director says.

Bouquet recalls, with some amusement, Blanc's determined attempts to put a positive spin on the ending. "Michel insists it's optimistic because my character leaves and his goes into a home to get psychiatric treatment. He's very worried if you say anything else because it is, after all, supposed to be a comedy. I find the film neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Some characters end well, some don't. They do what they can."

It's a view shared by Doillon (who, incidentally, is the film's fourth English link, albeit an indirect one: she is Jane Birkin's daughter). "Loads of people told me, 'Oh, what a depressing movie. We laugh and then we come out and suddenly, half an hour later, we think, God, is love that?' I feel it is in a way, but I like what one character says at the end: life is fine if you zigzag through it. I'm only 20 and there are more things in my life that made me sad than made me very happy, but I think you can really savour the happy moments because of all the disastrous moments on the side."

Some viewers balked at the film's view of women. They are its most complex characters, but they are also presented in a sardonic, unflattering light. "It's true that it's the point of view of a man," Doillon says. "A woman would have done it in a much more ambiguous way." And yet, with these actresses and this setting, it's almost inevitable that the film would end up commemorating female friendship, sexuality and the justifiable pursuit of pleasure - in a way you suspect an English version would have been unlikely to manage.

Rampling has a theory about this difference. "In England, women have been excluded from society. At dinner, they would not necessarily be allowed to stay when the conversation gets good and the cigars and port come out. Most of the leading class of Englishmen have been to boarding schools and don't know how to treat women. The French love to seduce, and you can always have fun on a frivolous level. They have always revered women, and their women have become very beautiful because of that."