The Night Porter
The Night Porter is a highly controversial 1974 film starring
Dirk Bogarde and
Charlotte Rampling. The film was made by the
Italian director Liliana Cavani.
Thirteen years after
World War II a
concentration camp survivor and her tormentor, currently the night porter at a
Vienna hotel, meet again and fall back into their
sadomasochistic relationship. Dirk Bogarde plays Maximilian Theo Aldorfer, the former
Nazi SS officer, and Charlotte Rampling plays Lucia Atherton, the
concentration camp survivor. To hide his shame from the past Max works obsessively as a hotel night porter where his aim is to please his guests, especially the Countess -- a confidante who requires his services as to get her young men as sexual partners.
Encyclopedia
The Night Porter is a highly controversial 1974 film starring
Dirk Bogarde and
Charlotte Rampling. The film was made by the
Italian director Liliana Cavani.
Thirteen years after
World War II a
concentration camp survivor and her tormentor, currently the night porter at a
Vienna hotel, meet again and fall back into their
sadomasochistic relationship. Dirk Bogarde plays Maximilian Theo Aldorfer, the former
Nazi SS officer, and Charlotte Rampling plays Lucia Atherton, the
concentration camp survivor. To hide his shame from the past Max works obsessively as a hotel night porter where his aim is to please his guests, especially the Countess -- a confidante who requires his services as to get her young men as sexual partners. 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 live witness who can testify against him -- the young Viennese camp inmate who is now married to an American opera conductor. She is someone he sexually abused in the camp and Max can't 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.
The Night Porter uses landscape as character, and its desaturated tones evoke memory of
the Holocaust and a shady 1950s Vienna plagued by post-World War II guilt. In fact, this is a film full of shadows and shame, and Max and Lucia are victims of this frightening new world in which nothing can be trusted and their forbidden love doomed to misunderstanding. The film depicts not only the political continuity between wartime Nazism and post-war Europe, but also the psychological continuity of characters locked into compulsive repetition of the past.
Criticism
Cavani's work has provoked strong reaction from critics and public alike. For
The Night Porter she was both celebrated for her courage in dealing with the disturbing theme of sexual transgression and, simultaneously, castigated for the startlingly controversial manner in which she presented that transgression – within the scandalising context of a Nazi Holocaust narrative. Given the film's dark and disturbing themes and a somewhat ambigious moral clarification at the end,
The Night Porter has tended to divide audiences. It is, however, the film for which Cavani is best known.
Film critic
Roger Ebert remarked that "
The Night Porter is as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering."
See also
- Sadism and masochism in fiction
External links
