CINEMA

Cinema

Cinema

Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) Directed by Liliana Cavani

Max (Dirk Bogarde) is a discreet, unassuming night porter working in a posh hotel in Vienna in 1957, tending to the guests' needs, from cold water to a bed-warming gigolo. Then Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) arrives at the hotel, on the arm of her husband, an American composer, and Max's past comes flooding back to him. It turns out Max was an S.S. officer at a Nazi concentration camp where Lucia was a beautiful young prisoner. She became, in effect, Max's sexual slave. Now, years later, their reunion shatters both of their lives. Lucia stays in Vienna after her husband travels on, in order to see Max, and they find themselves caught up in a renewal of their former sadomasochistic relationship. Max has an upcoming show trial for his war crimes. His former S.S. comrades have been carefully destroying documents and "filing away" witnesses to clear all their names, and, while Max tries to keep Lucia's existence a secret from them, they eventually find out about her. They consider her a threat, and they urge Max to turn her over to them. He quits his job, and he and Lucia hide out in his apartment, while his former friends keep watch. Liliana Cavani (Ripley's Game) co-wrote and directed this controversial film, Il Portiere di Notte, which she reportedly based partly on her own interviews with a Holocaust survivor. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

On a global scale, Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter sharply divided critics upon release. Reviewers generally fell into two camps -- the Euro critics, who almost unanimously hailed it as a masterpiece -- and the über-P.C. American commentators, such as Pauline Kael, who referred to it in the New Yorker as "proof that women can make junk just as well as men." Roger Ebert even went so far as to blast the film, damning it "as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering."

Brushing these criticisms aside for a second, The Night Porter, over three decades later, feels strongest in retrospect because Cavani manages -- in two hours -- to deeply engrave one of the most credible portraits of sadomasochistic bondage ever committed to celluloid, outside of Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. Cavani uses the Nazi mystique to climb deeply into the womb of sadomasochism, exposing the inner sicknesses and depravity inherent in S & M -- so deeply that the viewing experience becomes palpable, sweat-inducing, and wickedly uncomfortable. The director's refusal to become sexually gratuitous or explicit is exactly the point; she begins with the widely accepted conviction that sadomasochism is sexual and digs deeper, plunging into the pathological core of the dominance/submission dynamic. The film gradually becomes a dark immersion into the psyches of two individuals who enjoy giving and receiving pain, and an orchestra of sadomasochistic nuance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the picture's final act; the band of Nazis intent on ...