Charlotte Rampling has a louche aura that will never dissipate. I have met other celebrities, hung out with them before or after press screenings, at festivals, Isabelle Huppert and Jon Ham come to mind, but it was my brief encounter with Ms. Rampling that left me wishing I had said something witty, along the lines of, “I discovered when I watched Night Porter that there is a correlation between power and sexual desire. I mean, sex without power structures is just fucking to have an orgasm. Good sex requires transgression, not permission nor equality,” at which point I imagine her breaking out into a husky better version than the original Marlene Dietrich rendition of “Wenn Ich etwas wunschen wurde…. .”

Yes, Charlotte Rampling made me “etwas wunschen,” in a way that continues to surprise me these many years later. When I met her, the sun was setting over the Hudson River, of which we had obstructed views from the penthouse perch where the soiree was hosted. People with influence mingled and drank French champagne over canapes and the Getty photographers prowled around the edges like crows looking to swoop in, if anything glittery caught their eyes, to center their lens on, to take a picture of for the record.

Ms. Rampling was tall, I suppose she always will be tall, but her bedroom eyes were a little more sleepy, although still sultry, and her cheek bones provided a classic feline frame. I was relieved to see that there were no lip injections and she was recognizable, like a finely sculpted marble statue that has weathered the hail storms and the unrelenting sun. She was not striving to freeze herself or to remove the marks of time, unlike Isabelle Huppert , who seems to be perpetually 44. There is always something disconcerting about a face with no marks, no smile lines, no spots, perhaps like a book that is never finished and leaves you wondering, “but what happened? Is there a punch line?” A good novel always surprises you at the end, provides an “Ah-ha moment,” that redeems the investment of your time as a reader. I recently read the Booker Prize winning Kairos and for the life of me couldn’t figure out why I should care about this young East German woman having an affair for many years with a man older than her father until the last page, and then I thought, “Oh, that was brilliant. I should read that again more carefully.” A very good book make makes you want to go back, to pay more attention, to connect the dots.

 You want to say to anyone over 51, “Please tell me your story, let me see your battle scars and I will show you mine.” I do not want anyone to be stuck at 44, a horrible age no matter how you look at it, for most women. The children are still at home, you have no bandwidth for yourself, your husband ignores you, like a comfortable armchair that should be sat upon but he prefers to stretch out on the sofa with plenty of distance between the two of you. You live in the same house but in adjacent spaces. He has taken up golf, you have taken up yoga between driving the teens to their after-school activities, grocery shopping and the endless errands that consume your days. Did I mention the dog?

Jon Ham was, surprisingly for the “Most Handsome Man in America,” rather non-descript. It could be that when I met him he was traveling “incognito,” not wanting to attract attention to himself. I was at a film festival, at an agent’s party and his latest film was premiering the next morning. He described the movie he was in as a Sci Fi film, and when I pushed further, confessed he was the lead actor. I am a slow monkey and thought, “Oh, another indie film premier,” even after I watched the film, which I liked very much, I did not connect the dots. The critics said it was “claustrophobic,” which made me laugh. It made me wonder if they have never lived with the dying, who do suck the air out of a room, never cared for someone with a terminal life sentence, a person with a tendency to live in the past, as most of us will at some point when our glory days are behind us? I liked the film and how it offered a shot at immortality through frozen memories because essentially aren’t we our memories, the stories we tell, and not our bodies? Our stories live on, if they are interesting enough, long after our bodies have disintegrated or been incinerated.

But back to Ms. Rampling. She is for me the female version of Sean O’Connor: sophisticated, debonair, subtle, with excellent sartorial discretion. She was mysterious and courageous when she walked across the bridge with Dirk Bogarde. She is walking away from bourgeois domesticity and marriage, from everything polite society approves of. She cannot go back once she starts to walk across the bridge. The Criterion Collection desdribes the film as, “Operatic and disturbing, The Night Porter deftly examines the lasting social and psychological effects of the Nazi regime.”

This makes me pause. Are all relationships that incorporate power and dominance a vestige of the Nazi regime? Are most sexual people actually secret closet Nazis because they like to be dominated or to dominate? I disagree with Criterion and would say that it is a film that examines sex between adults and its enhancing transgressions, similar to Last Tango in Paris or even A Street Car Named Desire. Does this mean Marlon Brando was a closet Nazi just waiting for the right roles to express his true fascistic nature? I always thought he was hot in a way that Hugh Grant was not.

Or, in our striving for equality, do we deny that there is hierarchy, power structures both visible and invisible? Is equality always the penultimate goal, not only in the board room and the classroom and the bedroom, or will we allow ourselves to explore what has become forbidden?

If we dare, who will stop us?