It took me a long time to watch this movie, as I was intrigued by the controversy but scared of the content and what it would do with me emotionally.
The night porter released in 1974 by the italian regisseur Liliana Cavani created a big scandal with the Italian prosecution authority declaring it as unmoralic that lead to a censor of the movie. Followed by a strike of the international cinema industry, it was allowed as a piece of art, which in my view it definitely is. 2023, 49 years later Cavani was awarded with the Golden Lion in Venice for her Lifetime Achievement with a speech held by the movies main actress Charlotte Rampling.
Playing in Vienna in the 1950s the war-criminal Max lives unrecognized working as a night-porter in a hotel. The nazi-trials are currently running and his group from the past is working on eliminating evidence and witnesses. One evening Lucia checks in into the hotel due to a performance of her husband who is an opera conductor having a performance in Vienna. Recognizing Max from her time in the concentration camp in a traumatic deja-vu experience the past comes back to the present. Irrationally she decides to stay in the hotel after her husband leaves and insight into the dynamics of the Stockholm-syndrome emerges for the viewer. Max with psychotic tendencies who killed witnesses before redevelops his relationship with Lucia which is not appreciated by his fellow Nazi-commerades from the past. After being trapped in Max apartment everything becomes more dramatic over time, pulling the viewer more and more inside the relationship and into uncomfortable moments.
Hated for the sexualization of the Nazi-times, the movie didn’t receive the appreciation it deserves, while generating a cult-following on the other side. But as Charlotte Rampling once said in an interview “People should take more time to think”. Polarizing by it’s content it strikes me how Cavani puts the viewer into a dilemma, where the viewer starts to sympathize with the two main-characters, that have an always switching irrational sado-masochistic relationship which started to develop in the worst conditions at a concentration camp. With moral abysses, trauma and one of the darkest times of history as side-characters the movie gets a flavor, that other movies without that context can’t recreate. While watching it I had multiple times the urge to just throw my iPad away, as I couldn’t stand the scenes of violence and abuse, but the teachings of the human psychology behind it and the highly mind bending scenes full of dynamics, structural contrasts, drama and aesthetic pleasures where worth the pain, making it one of the most thought-provoking and therefore best movies I have ever watched. Despite it’s age the movie is timeless and for every open-minded connoisseur of great cinematography a must watch for the movie-bucketlist.
