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Ever since its release in 1973, Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter has been subject to mixed reviews, including its dismissal as "pornographic" for its sexual explicitness, and as "amoral" for "romanticizing" the Holocaust. Shane Dallman (2005), recalling such criticisms, concludes the opposite: "Disturbing? Unquestionably. Exploitation? As the term is accepted, no. This is not a Nazi film. Neither is it a sex film, a gore film, or a thrill show of any kind. This is a challenge . . . and a warning . . . to anyone who would dare explore the darkest realms of the human mind." (pp. 2-3).
Indeed, in the present author's admittedly subjective opinion, die film sustains such a message with cinematic interest and artistic coherence three decades after its release. Its holding power appears to stem neither from its controversial eroticism nor from its unusual approach to Holocaust subject matter. Rather, the film endures because, while on one level it draws the viewer into a traditional cinematic narrative about two souls enmeshed in each other's lives and caught up in intrigue, it is also a film of social and artistic inquiry. It makes one think about troubling matters, such as whether a brutal sadist is capable of shame, guilt, and love and whether sex can ever be divorced from the subjugation of one person by another (or whether, more subtly, it involves collaboration for mutual surrender and the emergence of a felt sense of intimacy and consequent pleasure). The film also indirectly questions whether normative sexuality can be so readily distinguished from traumatic compulsion.
By implicitly asking such questions, Cavani's film alludes to the tradition of postwar Italian cinema, such as the early work of Fellini and Antonioni, exposing the dark side of the middle class and the loss of personal moorings. At the same time, it explores several enduring themes of psychoanalysis, seeking, through its exploration of the twists and turns of a self-destructive liaison, to portray the contradictory nature of sexuality, character, and relationships. Indeed, the entire film is structured via leitmotifs, in which normality, sociopathy, and neurosis masquerade as one another.
One reason the film's reviews have been so divergent is that Cavani chose not to provide direct answers to questions such as those cited...