Kayleigh Donaldson
Depending on who you ask, The Night Porter is either a radical study of sexual transgression or a shameless attempt to sensationalize one of the darkest parts of human history. Liliana Cavani’s psychological drama, which turns 50 this year, is easy to view as treasure or trash, depending on your perspective.
Max, a former Nazi SS Officer (Dirk Bogarde) and the concentration camp prisoner, Lucia, (Charlotte Rampling) he abused and protected in equal measure, meet again a decade after the Second World War. She’s now the wife of a revered orchestra conductor and he’s a night porter laying low in the hotel she checks into. They soon fall back into their twisted affair, forever permeated by the memories of their pasts and watched over by the former SS officers who hide from punishment in the shadows.
Writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, Michel Foucault called the film out for what he saw as the sexualizing of the Nazi rule. In fairness, it is tough to ignore criticisms that the film aestheticizes Nazism when its most enduring image, that of Charlotte Rampling in an SS Officer’s cap with suspenders covering her breasts, has been adopted by everyone from Madonna to Moschino. In that aspect, The Night Porter follows in an ignoble tradition that extended well beyond the film’s release: the fetishizing of fascism, or Nazispolitation, as the genre became known. As Susan Sontag noted in her essay “Fascinating Fascism”, written in 1975 (the year after this film’s release), “The SS was designed as an elite military community that would be not only supremely violent but also supremely beautiful.” This gets into the thick and tangled weeds of a film that is tough to easily categorize as moral or repugnant: what if it’s both? And can it pull off that duel?
Max and Lucia initially try to avoid one another. Their present-day interactions are frequently interrupted by flashbacks to the concentration camp, where she found herself imprisoned due to her socialist father’s politics. The pair first meet when she is stripped naked and Max is filming her, immediately making the natural voyeurism of the filmgoer an act of culpability in this crime. In this time, their relationship, if it can ever be simply described as such, was both a private sacrilege and a performance for the Nazi Party. Lucia’s dance to a Marlene Deitrich song, acting as the Salome of this prison, is almost a parody of Weimar-era cabaret. It, like the rest of the film, is shot with such an austere gaze, unjudging and unflinching. Many of the officers seem bored by the sight of a semi-nude prisoner dancing for their entertainment. The banality of evil is only such for its perpetrators, not its victims.
Lucia is not the only former prisoner who recreates her past experiences within the concentration camp. Max’s fellow former officers engage in a form of legal roleplay, conducting mock trials all while working to eliminate possible witnesses who could have them properly punished for their crimes. They seem stifled by their shame — but not so much that they want to confess how actively involved they were in war crimes. They claim to be cured of their sickness, yet are proud to have served in the Third Reich. By contrast, Max refuses to purge his shame or participate in the fake courts. Instead, he wears his guilt like a fine tuxedo.
When Max and Lucia reignite their affair, hungrily reenacting their abusive dynamic even though the balance of power is now reversed, the other officers seek to remove her from the picture. Soon, the pair become paranoid recluses, shut off from the world and basic resources like food. Many critics found it unbelievable that Lucia would voluntarily partner with Max after what he did to her, that it was contrived to see her leave her perfectly normal husband to allow herself to sink into total oblivion with an abusive Nazi who assaulted her. Certainly, the persistent distance of Caviani’s camera and her steadfast refusal to offer any kind of moral opinion on the unfolding matters is unsettling. It’s not hard to view what follows as problematic, even tasteless. It is.
Then again, the horrors of a genocide are tasteless. The fact that people think Rampling in SS gear is hot is proof perfect that the Nazi’s propagandistic tactics continue to work. Pleasure and pain often exceed logic, and our lives frequently make more sense as allegory than reality. Cavani suggests that there’s something almost barbaric about trying to move on from something as abhorrent as the Holocaust. It simply cannot be done, and there’s a solid reasoning that it shouldn’t either. Max and Lucia’s affair ends in their mutual destruction, the only escape they have from the past.
It’s tough to accept that some may never overcome their trauma. That’s a kind of hopelessness we deny and for good reason, but there’s a truth to it and depicting it cannot help but delve into questions about how we present such processes. Cinema has long been plagued with the question of whether or not it’s possible to depict something as atrocious as war without the sheen of filmmaking inevitably making it seem cool or glamorous. The Night Porter strips away all flourishes of style in its portrayal of the unthinkable made flesh and still faced those accusations. The acts themselves are the pain, but therein lies the bind. To watch is to make it worse, but so is to look away.
“The Night Porter” is streaming on the Criterion Channel, Max, and Tubi.
