Director: Liliana Cavani
Running Time: 118 mins
Certificate: 18
Release Date: July 30th 2012
At the time it was made, The Night Porter was seen as intensely controversial, and even now it remains an occasionally uncomfortable experience, largely as it refuses to give easy answers for what is going on. Dirk Bogarde plays Max, who works as a night porter at a Vienna hotel in 1957. However Max has a secret former life, as 13 years before he was an SS officer in the Nazi concentration camps.
Along with a network of fellow former Nazis, he’s managed to keep his former identity a secret, but there are always people looking for Nazis, especially those like Max and his friends who haven’t fully renounced their previous ideology. Then a woman called Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) arrives at the hotel, who is a former prisoner who Max had an intense relationship with in the camps. While you’d expect her to revile him, they fall back into the strange sado-masochistic relationship they had before. [Read more…]