Critics reviews

Why is the movie about the worst crimes so clearly invested in the pleasures of its rituals, so confused about who deserves what? And each film is the least explicable when it is at its most violent.

Whether the film is deemed gutsy or cynical, Bogarde, in Max's dark stillness, and Rampling, in Lucia's agonized twitchiness, give bravely evocative performances with undeniable staying power, from the brilliantly ambivalent moment of mutual recognition in the film's opening minutes through its caustic, hardboiled denouement.

I was persuaded to return to it after rereading Mary Gaitskill's terrific recent T magazine profile of the star; in her appraisal of Rampling's performance, the writer singles out how the actress gives "the look of a trapped animal showing a submissive face while it prepares its next move." After a second viewing, I still think Night Porter is risible, but Gaitskill's assessment is sound. Veering from soigné to savage, Rampling brings a feral, frightening intensity to her incoherent character.

Perhaps the filmmaker tapped into something beyond her artistic capacity. By the time the doomed couple have barricaded themselves in a recreated concentration camp for two, "The Night Porter" has lurched into self-parody. But however incommensurate with the emotional tumult Ms. Cavani has unleashed, her ending does not mitigate the strength of the movie's conception or the haunting power of the couple's mutual helplessness and mad love.

It's possible to imagine a film that seriously explores the warped psychological foundation of such a union, depicting both parties as fearsomely complex individuals whose forbidden desires can't be neatly categorized. That film would be pretty damn bracing. The Night Porter, however, is not that film. Cavani treats Max and Lucia as empty abstractions, especially when they're rolling around together.

Max asks of the Countess: "Insane or sane. Who's to judge?" Cavani's answer is entirely embedded within [the film's] devastatingly pointed assertion that thoroughly echoes, but brazenly challenges, Karl Marx's famous proclamation that "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas." We might now say that for Cavani, the institution of cinema allows her ideas to become the ruling ideas, but only so long as her flicker of images is given purchase within the exhibition space.

The Night Porter represents the Cavanian film at its best. She asserts her presence as the producer of the look and works to place her film against the strategies of dominant culture. Her characters embody a dream of a moment beyond, set against the rhetoric and the rituals of power, even when it alludes to a demonic underworld, to the experience of pleasure and terror represented by Max and Lucia.