The Night Porter
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| The Night Porter | |
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 Italian promotional poster |
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| Directed by | Liliana Cavani |
| Produced by | Robert Gordon Edwards Esa De Simone |
| Written by | Liliana Cavani |
| Starring | Dirk Bogarde Charlotte Rampling Philippe Leroy Gabriele Ferzetti Isa Miranda |
| Music by | Daniele Paris |
| Cinematography | Alfio Contini |
| Distributed by | The Criterion Collection |
| Release date(s) | France: 3 April 1974 United States: 1 October 1974 |
| Running time | 118 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | English Italian [1] |
The Night Porter (Italian: Il Portiere di notte) is a controversial 1974 film by Italian director Liliana Cavani, starring Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling.
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[edit] Synopsis
Dirk Bogarde plays Maximilian Theo Aldorfer, a former Nazi SS officer, and Charlotte Rampling plays Lucia Atherton, a concentration camp survivor who had an ambiguous relationship with Aldorfer. Flashbacks show Max tormenting Lucia, but also acting as her protector. In an iconic scene, Lucia sings a Marlene Dietrich song to the concentration camp guards while wearing pieces of an SS uniform, and Max rewards her with the head of a male inmate who had been bullying the other inmates. (A reference to Salome.)
Thirteen years after World War II, Lucia meets Aldorfer again; he is now the night porter at a Vienna hotel. There, they fall back into their sadomasochistic relationship.
To hide his shame about his past, Max works obsessively as a hotel night porter where his aim is to please his guests, especially the Countess—a confidante who needs his help to get young men for sex. Many of the other guests are war criminals, who hold secret meetings in the hotel to uncover any evidence connecting them with their war crimes. Max prepares with these former Nazis a strategy for his upcoming War Trial at the hands of the Allies, as they conduct mock trials to learn about records in the archives they should destroy and witnesses to be tampered with or eliminated.
Into this hotel culture, which reeks of nostalgia for the Führer, comes the only living witness who can testify against him—the former concentration camp inmate, Lucia Atherton, who is now married to an American opera conductor. She is someone he sexually abused in the camp and Max cannot stop obsessing over their past torturous relationship. They are drawn uncontrollably to each other despite the dark past both of them share and the apparent danger from Max's unchanged fanatical and bloodthirsty Nazi comrades, Klaus and Hans.
[edit] Themes
The film depicts the political continuity between wartime Nazism and post-war Europe and the psychological continuity of characters locked into compulsive repetition of the past. On another level it deals quite intelligently with what have now become the psychologically recognized conditions known as Lima Syndrome and Stockholm Syndrome. It also raises the issue of sleeper Nazi cells and their control, and possibly a hint at what could have spurred on the logical later 1960's reaction of the Red Army Faction (aka Baader-Meinhoff). Simplistically it works on the level of two people in an uneasy yet inextricably bounded relationship but also that is very much in the context of the greater political malaise of the War and the many years following. It should also be noted that Cavani herself met several women who had survived the horrors of Concentration camps, and Lucia (Rampling) is not branded as jewish particularly probably to depict the plight of all women, and doubtless the pun on her name meaning light and St Lucia being the patron saint of the blind was deliberate also. Max (Bogarde) quite clearly has some sort of guilt complex being afraid of the light, and wanting to live like a churchmouse: there are also allusions to sexual ambivalence from the start from his relationship with the naked male balletist.
[edit] Criticism
In responses to The Night Porter, Cavani was both celebrated for her courage in dealing with the theme of sexual transgression and, simultaneously, castigated for the controversial manner in which she presented that transgression: within the context of a Nazi Holocaust narrative. The film has been accused of mere sensationalism: film critic Roger Ebert calls it "as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering."[2] Given the film's dark and disturbing themes and a somewhat ambiguous moral clarification at the end, The Night Porter has tended to divide audiences. It is, however, the film for which Cavani is best known.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Note on the film's language: The IMDb (as of September 2009) lists the film's language exclusively as Italian. The Criterion DVD version is in English with the two principals speaking in English in their natural voices. If there is an Italian version where the minor characters speak in their natural Italian voices, and the principals are dubbed, then this variant is not noted in the IMDb's "Alternate Version" section.
- ^ Ebert, Roger (February 10, 1975). "The Night Porter". Chicago Sun-Times. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19750210/REVIEWS/502100301/1023. Retrieved 2008-12-23.
[edit] External links
- Portiere di notte, Il at the Internet Movie Database
- Filmografia di Liliana Cavani Detailed information on the film and its director.
- The Night Porter at Allmovie
- "Synopsis". The Criterion Collection. http://www.criterion.com/films/604. Retrieved 2008-12-23.
- Insdorf, Annette (Jan 11, 2000). "Criterion Collection essay". The Criterion Collection. http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/66. Retrieved 2008-12-23.
- Scherr, Rebecca (February 2000). "The Uses of Memory and the Abuses of Fiction: Sexuality in Holocaust Fiction and Memoir". Other Voices, vol. 2.1. http://www.othervoices.org/2.1/scherr/sexuality.html. Retrieved 2008-12-23.
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