THE NIGHT PORTER

Liliana Cavani’s THE NIGHT PORTER begins in Vienna in 1957, where Lucia, the wife of an American conductor, arrives at a hotel and recognises the night porter as Max, a former SS officer she knew in a concentration camp. Their encounter pulls the film backward into memory and back into a relationship shaped by terror, dependency, ritual and unfinished trauma. Cavani does not treat the past as something settled. She shows it returning through gestures, objects, costumes and performance.

Charlotte Rampling gives Lucia an unnerving stillness that makes the character hard to reduce to either victimhood or control. Dirk Bogarde meets her with a performance built on repression, shame, and obsessive repetition. Critics have long argued over the film because Cavani stages fascism, erotic power, and role-play all in the same frame. Some dismiss it as provocation, while others defend it as a disturbing attempt to show how trauma can deform desire and bind people to what destroyed them. I'm showing it as part of my Women In Film Fest so you can make up your own mind.

WHY IT’S INCLUDED IN THIS WEEK’S PROGRAM;
I'm showing THE NIGHT PORTER so you can make up your own mind. It's arguably the most controversial film in this program, and that is part of why it matters. Cavani, one of the few women working at this scale in 1970s European cinema, made a film that refuses comfort and refuses moral simplification. It places a woman at the centre of a story about memory, power, sexual politics, and the afterlife of fascism, then leaves the audience to wrestle with what they have seen.