It was flaunted as the most controversial picture of its time, and not falsely. Even today, one can hardly watch Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter without questioning the morals of the story, its characters, and perhaps of the creative freedom bringing it all to life on the screen.
The movie takes the viewer to 1957 in Vienna where former Nazis are readjusting their lives and destroying evidence of their war crimes so as to come clean in the trials that are being held to hold them accountable for their atrocities. Maximilian Theo Aldorfer, or Max (Dirk Bogarde), is one of them – a former Nazi officer who now works at a hotel as a night porter. One of the guests, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), arriving one evening to stay at his hotel turns out to be the teenage girl who was a prisoner at the concentration cap where he worked.
The conflict in the characters is multi-fold as we see in flashbacks the past interactions of Max and Lucia, both having struck a sadomasochistic sexual relationship at the camp. Now face-to-face at the hotel, the two rekindle their past flame while Lucia is married to an American musician and her resurfacing as a potential witness is a threat to Max as well as his fellow Nazis in the area. It’s the game of pleasure vs danger reset for another round.
The Night Porter takes dramatic tension of relationship and morals to a summit of engagement. A married woman’s affair with a hotel worker behind her husband’s back in the ’50s alone wouldn’t be such a shocker. But a concentration camp survivor getting back into a relationship with a Nazi, and this time of her own free will, is too much for the morals of the times, then and now.
However, insulating via the filter of psychology can take the stigma off the movie’s story and characters for a deeper understanding of the motives and feelings at play. The fluid boundary of one’s comfort spilling over trauma and moral tethers to relive the experience of risky pleasures makes a compelling psychological case study.
Visually, Cavani doesn’t make the movie an actual erotica or sexploitation; far from it. Nudity and sexual content is strictly pared to the scene’s dramatic impact. As an R-rated title, it is more a political trigger than anything else. Bogarde and Rampling prove their acting virtuosity as Max and Lucia. For Bogarde at least, one can’t expect anything less anyways.
The Night Porter is a classic taking the audience’s appreciation of art and the complexity of human relationships to the edge of comfort. It’s a daring presentation for the viewer not shy of studying taboos.
