The Night Porter

One of the movies that I recorded last autumn during the "Women Make Film" spotlight on TCM was The Night Porter. Because it's a European film and becaue of its arthouse nature, it's unsurprising that it's gotten a Criterion release, which probably also has something to do with why this particular movie was included in the spotlight.

Dirk Bogarde plays the titular porter, a man named Max working the night shift at a hotel in Vienna in 1957. There, he has flashbacks to his past, mostly dealing with his service in World War II that would have had Simon Wiesenthal hunting for him, which helps explain why he's reduced to the night shift and living in a shabby apartment nearby. There are some people around who also served in the war, and, like Max, could easily be put on trial for what they did.

Coming to the hotel as a guest is American conductor Atherton and his wife, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling). When Lucia walks into the lobby, both she and Max think they see somebody they know. In fact, the two do know each other. Max had served as a "doctor" at one of the concentration camps near Budapest for mostly non-Jewish criminal types, this allowing him to carry out his cruel predilections. Lucia wound up at the camp for reasons that aren't exactly clear but don't really matter.

Max decides that Lucia is somebody he can sexually exploit, and Lucia more or less lets it happen for the same reasons we get Kapos in a movie like Kapo. Some people come to the uncomfortable conclusion that they will be more likely to survive if they can come up with a way to be useful to the Nazis. For Lucia, this didn't mean becoming a kapo herself, just being Max's sex object, which perversely also gives her some sense of power over him -- Max needs her.

And so, now that she's in Vienna and in the same hotel where Max works, there's a chance that the two could continue their sexual relationship that to a well-adjusted observer from the outside might seem bizarre. But Lucia, having been in the concentration camp, also presents a problem to Max in that if he ever were to be put on trial, she could testify against him.

Hans (Gabriele Ferzetti) leads a group of Nazis who lead mock trials which involve putting each other on trial and confessing their sins. This theoretically lets them expiate their guilt by talking about it openly with other people who face the same danger of being put on real trial, but also allows the Nazis to collect the evidence that will put them on trial and destroy such evidence so that it can no longer be used in a real trial. Unforunately, this also means killing people who could be witnesses, so Max realizes Lucia's life is in danger. And the Nazis will stop at nothing to get Lucia to "testify".

There's certainly an interesting premise in The Night Porter, but it's a movie that sharply divides opinion. A lot of people are uncomfortable because the movie openly puts Max and Lucia's kinks on screen for all to see, and doesn't really criticize it. I'm not the biggest fan of love scenes, but at the same time I'm also not more put off by the fact that the scenes presented here are decidedly more pushing the boundaries by dealing with BDSM sex.

Where I had a problem with the movie is that it seemed interminably slow. There are long relatively silent sequences of pans and characters walking. We get it already. There's also the obvious issue that to many people, there might not be even one sympathetic character in the movie, even Lucia. (Lucia's husband is only in the film briefly.)

The Night Porter is certainly different, and not to everybody's taste. But for those open to watching something more challenging, why not give The Night Porter a try?