How the film by Liliana Cavani, 'Night Porter' is an ode to love

Night Porter with Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling

The above image is from the brilliant film of Liliana Cavani, Night Porter.  Many criticized the film, saying it belittled the horrors of Nazi concentration camps during the second world war and was just a flirtation with sex and power, peppered with sadomasochism.

But in fact, the film achieves much more than these critics have seen.  Not only does it follow the story of a nazi soldier who is attracted to a Jewish woman, but it shows how love can dissolve all the power and control of ego, which is the cause of all war and battle and hatred.

We see in the film a young woman, who is lined up with naked Jewish inmates in a concentration camp.  The nazi doctor is supposed to be photographing the arriving prisoners, only his camera is drawn to the young woman.  He uses his power to remove her from the camp, where she becomes his mistress.

Following this, a distorted and perverse relationship seems to be violated further by a sadomasochistic physical relationship, and one is often puzzling why a young girl should have such affection for the man who represents the evil side and the cause of the horrors to her whole family and community.

Our assumption that her peculiar devotion to the Nazi doctor must be a result of mental illness caused by the fear, torture and mental turmoil she has been through.

However, in the background of the film is the presence of Mozart's Magic Flute, an opera about true love.  As the film progresses, it could almost be argued  that the Nazi soldier in the film, who is played by Dirk Bogarde, is a sort of Romeo figure, a Shakespearean Montegue, and that his loved one, the Jewish prisoner, played by Charlotte Rampling, is his Juliette, a Capulet, and that the only way anyone can dissolve their conflict, wounds and find themselves is through love.

Several years after the war, while Nazis are in hiding and are evading trials for their war crimes, the paths of Bogarde and Rampling cross again.  Rather than flee from him, we are rather surprised to discover that Rampling's character chains herself to his apartment to be with him.  Their sexual relations continue, and she rejects her perfectly loving husband to return to this perverse relationship with Bogarde.

What I believe the film does is explore with courage the reasons for humanity to have such deplorable wars.  With courage Cavani takes away the cotton wool we prefer to cover history with with so we do not face and explore its reasons.  The only way to understand history is to explore it and learn from it so that our future is different.

On the surface, it seems that the vile control of Hitler and the Nazi movement has violated the young girl's head.  But strangely we are revealed, as the film goes on, of her willing to sacrifice her own life for Bogarde.

The pain they cause one another in their sadomasochism, is often the cause of a subsequent healing and is its antidote.  Love is a pool that fills these two maladaptive misfits and Bogarde, who prefers to live in the night and sleep in the day to not be reminded of his actions, prefers to be an anonymous 'night porter'  The realization that he had given up his sense of self in the mob mentality of the Nazis is now his biggest regret. That he should have fallen in love with the victim of his Nazi enemy is his awakening to the foolishness.

Bogarde, before he is shot, is perhaps lucky enough to realize how foolish and ridiculous has been the Nazi mentality and the egos involved, in which he had lost a sense of self.  That all humans, should they ever lose a sense of themselves, that is the biggest tragedy.  The film shows that we could be drawn into any gang or dangerous mob mentality, such as that of Nazism or any destructive group, and that it is our responsibility is to be aware of true selves and our own thoughts.

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