The Night Porter

The Brief

As one of the few female Italian directors with a consistent and substantial body of work, Liliana Cavani, together with Lina Wertmüller, holds a very special position in Italian film production. Another thing the two have in common is an intellectual foundation for their films. In The Night Porter, it is the dark sides of sexuality that dominate, and Cavani evokes some disturbing images of the connection between fascism and perversions. Max has a past as an SS officer in a concentration camp, where among other things he participated in experiments on prisoners. 17 years after the war, he hides from the world as a night porter at a fashionable hotel in Vienna. A perfect job for someone who is ashamed to go out in the light. But everything changes when Lucia, a woman he abused in the camp, appears as a guest at the hotel. They begin a new relationship, characterized by sadomasochistic dependency and the resumption of traumas, with clear roots in their previous guard-prisoner relationship. The film is known as one of the most controversial in European film history, and was banned in several countries for its aestheticization of Nazi violence and a theme that challenges moral and psychological boundaries. Cavani places herself here in the tradition of Luchino Visconti's The Damned, using the same actors to explore decadence and ideological corruption. And it is primarily the tension between the lead actors Rampling and Bogarde that makes the exploration of a victim's psychological reaction to sexualized violence work beyond the narrow shock effect.