The Night Porter
Director: Liliana Cavani
Writer: Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati
Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Giuseppe Addobbati, Isa Miranda
Seen on: 9./10.6.2025

Content Note: concentration camps, holocaust, rape, sexualized violence, dubious consent

Plot:
Max (Dirk Bogarde) is the night porter in a fancy hotel in Vienna. He takes his job seriously, but flies mostly under the radar. Until Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) checks into the hotel. She immediately recognizes him, given that he was an officer at the concentration camp she was interned at. Back then, he groomed her into a sexual relationship – a relationship they both rekindle now.

The Night Porter is definitely a movie made for provocation. Most of the time, when a movie tries to provoke me, I get bored, but in this case, I found a lot of what The Night Porter did interesting and literally thought-provoking. It does overdo it in the end, but at least it is never boring.

[SPOILERS]

The Night Porter is most interesting when it allows us to think about Lucia’s apparently non-sensical decisions. Why wouldn’t she report Max immediately? Why is she drawn to him again? Why does she re-enact her own abuse? My personal interpretation is that it allows her to basically retroactively expunge the violence she endured. If she is a willing participant now, she probably was back then, too. And if she was a willing participant, why wouldn’t she want to rekindle her relationship. It’s a twisted trauma response that allows for the many complexities of the human psyche, more complexities than victims in films are often afforded.

The problem is, though, that the film loses track of this line of thought and starts to abuse Lucia, too. Probably the most famous scene, where a half-naked Lucia performs at a party/orgy at the concentration camp doesn’t subvert, doesn’t criticize, just gives us a sexy Nazi victim dressed up as a Nazi. It’s a sensual when it should show the violence.

Plus, the way things spiral out of control, with Max’ old Nazi colleagues literally the only one trying to keep Lucia and Max apart, and leading ultimately to a death for both of them that seems to frame them as an actually romantic couple, it just spirals way too far. It is no longer exploring character complexities, but turning them into clichés instead.

With that turn, the film ultimately does a disservice to the victims of the Holocaust, even though I think it tried to set out to say something about the continuing legacy of the violence both endured and committed that fundamentally alters everybody involved. It just never gets to a clear point, losing itself in the provocation instead of the criticism.

Summarizing: interesting but doesn’t really work in the end.