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‘The Night Porter’ Blu-ray review

Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film The Night Porter has always had the weight of controversy surrounding it since its initial release, thanks to its interpretation of a bleak subject matter. The film pairs veteran British film star and former matinee idol Dirk Bogarde, who had largely abandoned acting to pursue a writing career in semi-retirement in France by this time, with Charlotte Rampling, who was young, sexy, vibrant and a rising star.

The action takes place in Vienna in 1957, just over a decade after the end of World War Two. Former SS officer Max (Bogarde), now determined to lead a quiet life, “like a dormouse”, holds down a job at an exclusive hotel that, despite its aura of gentility, provides sexual pleasure for those guests who seek it. When her musician husband has a piece performed in Vienna, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) comes to stay at the hotel. She recognises Max immediately. She is the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp where Max had tortured and abused her during the war.

Credit Cult Films

The story does not follow the expected path of the victim’s horror at coming face-to-face with her abuser from the past. Instead, it takes an even darker turn and examines an awakened sexual lust in both main characters, partially explained through flashbacks. In order to survive in the concentration camp, Lucia had made herself sexually attractive to the SS officers, appealing especially to their kinky desires. Max in particular had developed a strong lust for her. In opening up painful memories of the past, their chance meeting years later also unearths hidden, unspeakable passions that lock their fates together. For Max’s life is not that of a dormouse – a group of Nazis with similar shameful pasts are on his tail. They are trying to cover up the evidence of their crimes against humanity. A survivor like Lucia appearing out of the past could send them all to the gallows. His former Nazi friends and Lucia come to rely on Max’s loyalty for their very survival.

The Night Porter is undeniably a phenomenally powerful film. Once you have seen it, you can never forget it. There are compelling reasons why it has come to be considered a cult classic, and there are factors that bend enormously in its favour. The two lead actors are outstanding individually, but their chemistry, though twisted and almost incomprehensible in its destructive passion, brings the story to life and keeps audiences spellbound. Although he lived for another 25 years after the film, there were few further acting credits to Bogarde’s name. He had become highly selective about film projects, and tended to make small budget independent films with artistic merit, such as The Night Porter with Liliana Cavani, and Death in Venice with Luchino Visconti. As such, although his earlier film career was more lucrative, it was in the 1970s that he produced his best work. The Night Porter is certainly Bogarde as you have never seen him before – going so far as to have his nipple sucked in one scene. Charlotte Rampling was conversely in the first decade of a long career as a major character actor. Watching two incredibly magnetic performers act out a complex relationship with an ever-changing dynamic is thrilling.

Credit Cult Films

On the other hand, there’s no escaping how sordid and uncomfortable The Night Porter is as a viewing experience. It certainly leaves a lingering bad taste in the mouth. The way in which it captures the power an abuser has over his victim, and the control he is able to exert, rings psychologically true. So too does the depiction of the perversity of many of the SS officers. What’s disturbing is the lingering weight of the scenes, and the attention to detail. Cavani is forcing us to see, and to consider, the very worst of humanity, whilst at times dressing it up as an unconventional sexual relationship between apparently consenting adults. The physical damage they inflict upon one another is wearying to watch – at times the violence becomes too much to bear.

There are a few details that don’t entirely ring true. A Cabaret-inspired scene (the Liza Minnelli film was new at the time) involving a severed head in a box seems too fantastical even for the depravity of Nazi concentration camps. But since it is told in flashback as Max recounts his story to an elderly hotel guest, we are invited to wonder if he is embellishing the past, or even inventing it, acting as an unreliable narrator. Rampling recounts in an interview in the extra features that Bogarde had come to her with a script that needed work, but had the essence of a good idea. In the final analysis, The Night Porter does have a slightly disjointed, mechanical feel to the storytelling, the result of a script that had undergone numerous drafts.

Credit Cult Films

Those reservations aside, The Night Porter taken as a whole is an effective film. It is shocking and provocative, and enters territory that had, until it was made, been considered off limits as an affront to human decency to explore. Max and Lucia are stunningly created. Even if people and events surrounding them aren’t entirely fleshed out, audiences only care about the central, inexorably tragic relationship between the central characters.

Troubling, and raising more questions about human nature than it answers, The Night Porter is nevertheless stylish, intriguing and, where it becomes darkest and most dangerous, beguiling. It might reasonably be thought that in the near half-century since The Night Porter was created, the controversy around it would have waned. Perhaps this was the case for a time. But in today’s ultra-censorious, intolerant and offence-mongering culture, I would be surprised if The Night Porter’s return on Blu-ray doesn’t subject it, and those involved, to puritanical threats of cancellation. Yet art must be allowed the freedom to express the unpalatable and the unthinkable. It’s only by raising difficult questions that we can remember how best to respond to them.

Credit Cult Films

For fans who have seen the film on DVD, they will know that the prints they were transferred from were in poor condition. This 4K Blu-ray release is stunning in its remarkable restoration. The picture quality is crisp and the colours are vivid. This is the best quality anyone has seen the film in since it was first released. A thirty-seven minute interview with director and writer Liliana Cavani, recorded in 2020, comprises one extra feature. She talks in Italian, but there are English subtitles, and she takes viewers through the history of the film from inception to critical reaction, with behind-the-scenes photographs to embellish it. There is also a half-hour contemporary interview with Charlotte Rampling, who speaks fondly but honestly about her late co-star Dirk Bogarde, and how he brought her into the project all those years ago.

Credit Cult Films

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Giuseppe Addobbati, Isa Miranda Director: Liliana Cavani Writer: Liliana Cavani Released by: Cult Films Certificate: 18 Duration: 119 mins Release date: 30th November 2020 Buy The Night Porter on Blu-ray now

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author avatar
Greg Jameson
Book editor, with an interest in cult TV.

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