The Night Porter

Directed by Liliana Cavani
1974
Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy

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 hunting down the renegade Max becomes not merely a gripping plot device, but -- in Cavani's hands, a manipulative ploy -- a deus ex machina that the director uses to strip bare the core of sadomasochistic yearning. Trapped by their pursuers in a barren apartment, Max and Lucia gradually, imperceptibly starve themselves to death, clinging psychologically (and physically) to one other and growing wan and emaciated; at one point, Lucia walks barefoot over broken glass, lacerating the soles of her feet -- an act that single-handedly reveals her need (and desire) for self-abuse. Cavani has, in a few brilliant strokes, stripped away the sex and reduced her two diseased lovers to the core of pathological need. Criticisms of this as disgusting or depraved are moot, for it remains utterly, chillingly, and peerlessly real.
The wonderful paradox in The Night Porter, of course, is that the film's presentation and context are deliberately unreal -- an irony that completely eluded critics like Ebert, who slammed the picture's historical inaccuracies. As David Mamet has noted, motion pictures may be dreamscapes by default, but Cavani heightens the dream effect in Porter, dramatically playing up the nightmarish aspects of her onscreen imagery as she toys liberally with historical detail -- as in her visceral glimpse of a Nazi carnival torture ride for Jewish girls (an image whose lightning-flash appearance -- and absence of explicit violence -- render it almost subliminal). In the end, the critics' need to attack Cavani as historically inaccurate become moot because The Night Porter never even attempts historical accuracy. Cavani has a different agenda altogether. Like Last Tango in Paris (with which it deserves comparison), The Night Porter is one of those gutsy films that extracts deep insights into pathology by constructing an unreal psychosexual phantasmagoria onscreen as a vehicle. The picture's depth and credibility on a psychopathological level thus could not possibly exist without the artificiality of the context that delivers it, fully justifying any contextual liberties that Cavani may take with her material, historical or otherwise. This forces us to look at the film's Nazi mythos allegorically instead of literally, exempting Cavani from accusations of Holocaust trivialization. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide