The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 3-9
Directed by Liliana Cavani
A thematically and technically daring cult classic, The Night Porter on its release was admired in Europe but loathed in the United States. The movie walks an arthouse tightrope between hard truth and exploitation, and often veers into the latter. Max (Dirk Bogarde), the eponymous service worker, is an ex-SS officer trying with a cadre of baleful fellow ex-Nazis to get past a war crimes trial and “live like a churchmouse,” toiling at night to mute his shame, when he randomly encounters Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), a young concentration camp survivor with whom he had a sadomasochistic relationship that unearthed a twisted kind of love. Lurid flashbacks telling this backstory linger too indulgently. Yet the film, set in Vienna in 1957, penetratingly conveys Europe’s postwar moral enervation. More dubiously, it suggests a kind of contributory fault—or at least Stockholm Syndrome—to the victims of Nazism: Lucia as well as Max is compelled to re-enact their wartime trysts. For her, “there is no cure,” while he halfheartedly excuses his warped brutality as “Biblical.” 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. Jonathan Stevenson (February 5-7, 11am at IFC Center’s Rampling series)