Director/co-writer Liliana Cavani’s mind-bending reflection on the Nazi era is a pure filmic transmogrification of power, war, sex, personal identity, and soul-searching.
Cavani reduces her complex wartime narrative to a dead-end reunion between Max (Dirk Bogard), an ex-SS officer and Nazi warder to his former prisoner Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), the imprisoned non-Jewish daughter to a Leftist activist at a Nazi concentration camp.
A chance encounter at the Vienna hotel where Max is employed as a bellman, derails Lucia’s post-war life as the concentration camp-survivor wife to a successful American symphony conductor busy on tour in Vienna.
In Cinema, Vienna is the place where people go to die.
Max and Lucia pick up their leftover BDSM desires from the days of their concentration camp experiences together when he was master to her prisoner/slave.
It is significant to realize that Liliana Cavani launched her filmmaking career with two historical documentaries (“The History of the Third Reich (1962) and “Women of the Resistance” (1965), for Radiotelevisione Italiana.
Clearly, Cavani’s deep insights into the mindsets of the Nazi’s prisoners, as well as that of their tormentor goons, adds significant anecdotal historic depth to “The Night Porter.”
The devil is in the details. Even wallpaper sends a message.
To compare “The Night Porter” to any other World War II film would be folly. Not even Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” can compare.
The necessary mental, physical, and emotional escape hatch that Max and Lucia employ serves as a temporary life raft from the anger, repression, and violence that rages around them, and deeply inside their tortured souls.
Fearless performances from Dirk Bogard and Charlotte Rampling give “The Night Porter” its humanity. For a film about the lasting effects of genocide, “The Night Porter” gives essential meaning to the madness with a delicate touch of palpable understanding.
Remembering the very thing that most people want to forget is a promise to oneself and a curse.
We are all damned by history, and all that history leaves out.
Rated R. 118 mins.
