Movie: The Night Porter

Well, I liked The Night Porter, although it is one of those films I could probably never watch (again) with any real emotional distance.

Liliana Cavani does not seem interested in making a comfortable film, nor is she particularly concerned with giving the viewer a safe moral position. What exists there is a deeply unhealthy relationship between memory, desire, guilt, and power. Max and Lucia do not fit easily into the categories we would like to use to understand them. The past did not end when the war ended. It remains present in their bodies, in their gestures, in their sexuality, and in the way they recognize each other so many years later.

Dirk Bogarde is extraordinary precisely because he does not try to make Max into something more palatable. There is a strange, almost pathetic fragility in him, but never enough to erase what he was. Charlotte Rampling achieves something even more difficult. Lucia seems at once trapped by the past and drawn to it. It is uncomfortable because the film refuses to explain exactly where trauma ends and desire begins.

And perhaps that is where The Night Porter is most interesting and also most problematic. The eroticization of the relationship between victim and perpetrator can feel like provocation for the sake of provocation, and I completely understand anyone who rejects the film because of that. At times, Cavani comes dangerously close to turning a story of violence and domination into a kind of aesthetic ritual. Even so, I think the film knows it is dealing with something repulsive. It does not ask us to admire that relationship. It only asks us to keep looking.

For me, there is also an unavoidable personal barrier. I am disgusted by Nazis. Not in some abstract or cinematic sense of the word. My grandparents suffered at their hands, so certain symbols, uniforms, and gestures provoke an immediate reaction in me. I cannot look at those things merely as costumes, aesthetics, or historical reconstruction. There is a family history behind them.

Curiously, that did not make me like the film any less. Perhaps it made me watch it with greater resistance.

The Night Porter is beautiful in many moments, but its beauty is almost always contaminated. There is no real nostalgia in that past, only people who never managed to leave it behind. And the film understands something terrible: surviving something does not necessarily mean escaping it.

I liked it a lot.

But it is a film that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

And I suspect that is exactly the point.