The Night Porter
(Directed by Liliana Cavani; starring Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling; 1975)
The Night Porter is as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering. It is (I know how obscene this sounds) Nazi chic. It’s been taken seriously in some circles, mostly by critics agile enough to stand on their heads while describing 180-degree turns, in order to interpret trash as “really” meaningful.
That’s not to say I object per se to the movie’s subject matter, a sadomasochistic relationship taken up again fifteen years after the war by a former SS concentration camp officer and the inmate he raped and dominated when she was a young girl. I can imagine a serious film on this theme—on the psychological implications of shared guilt and the identification of the slave with the master—but The Night Porter isn’t such a film; it’s such a superficial soap opera we’d laugh at it if it weren’t so disquieting.
Fascism and its favorite sexual taste, sadomasochism, have come into a certain degree of fashion in the movies recently, and that’s the subject of a scary essay by Susan Sontag in the New York Review of Books. She finds films like The Night Porter to be, on one level at least, attractive to certain audiences because of their undertones of doom and death. That may be an aspect of the times or it may just be that such movies reach areas of the personality that weren’t widely admitted before; she’s not sure. But she’s worried.
I am, too. For a long time I’ve defended the belief that what we see in the movies doesn’t direct our behavior, if we’re more or less normal; that there are infinitely greater influences all around us in society to explain deviant and violent behavior, and that the movies are just a convenient whipping boy. I still believe that, but I’m getting awfully weary of the violence I have to witness week after week as a critic.
It’s been years since most movie violence was motivated, explained, or even taken seriously by the characters themselves. In most of the violent exploitation movies I see, the killings and hurtings are just there, a way to get through a few minutes of screen time. The audience laughs, most often. But now here’s a movie that’s not intended for the action-and-escapism crowd, a movie presumably intended for more intelligent and venturesome audiences, who don’t laugh at it (although maybe it would be better if they did). What’s going on here?
The Night Porter has a nice, classy visual style, filled with browns and blacks (and blues), and good performances by its romantic leads, Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling. But it’s such nonsense. It gives us, through flashbacks and sketchy hints, the story of the relationship they had years earlier in the concentration camp, where his “little girl” appealed to him in a demented way, and she found herself enjoying the raping, the beating, and cuts and bruises.
Now they meet again in a Vienna hotel. She’s the wife of an American conductor, and he’s the quiet little night porter. All he wants to do, he says, is live “like a church mouse.” From the moment she sees him again, she’s bound to him. She stays behind when her husband leaves, then moves into his apartment and the fun and games start again: Chains and broken glass and slaps on the face are their aphrodisiacs, and they make love mostly on the floor.
Meanwhile, there’s a subplot so ridiculous it must be intended as fantasy. The Bogarde character is a member of a sort of Nazi encounter group that specializes in expiating past guilt and destroying evidence against itself. The Rampling character, alas, is the last surviving witness against Bogarde and so the Nazis want to kill her. They lay siege to the apartment, and the lovers slowly starve together. There’s no reason at all why the couple can’t be killed straightaway except that then, of course, the movie would be over.
The director, Liliana Cavani, describes her film as a love story, praises the honesty between her two leading characters, and sees the story as a straightforward handling of one aspect of the concentration camp experience. I see it as a shallow exploitation of that theme, containing no real insight or understanding. Even worse, the movie is now being marketed as a controversial audience-grabber. One theater marquee quotes the New York Times: “A kinky turn-on!” I looked up that Times review. Its opening sentence was: “Let us now consider a piece of junk.”
No Looking Back
(Directed by Edward Burns; starring Edward Burns, Blythe Danner; 1998)
Hobbies. That’s what the characters in No Looking Back need. Bowling or yard sales or watching the Knicks on television. Anything. Although the movie wants us to feel sympathy for them, trapped in meagre lives and empty dreams, I saw them as boring slugs. There is more to existence than moping about at bars and kitchen tables, whining about unhappiness while endlessly sipping from long-neck Budweiser bottles. Get a life.
The movie is the latest from Ed Burns, who won the Sundance Film Festival in 1995 with his rich and moving The Brothers McMullen, but has since made two thin and unconvincing films: She’s the One (1996) and now this one, in which self-absorbed characters fret over their lives. I have no brief against that subject matter; I simply wish the characters and their fretting were more interesting, or their unhappiness less avoidable.
The film is set in the bleak, wintry landscape of Rockaway Beach, New York, where Claudia (Lauren Holly) works in a diner and lives with Michael (Jon Bon Jovi), a mechanic. They are engaged, in a sense, but with no plans for marriage; Michael wants to marry her, but she’s “afraid to wake up ten years from now” still working in the diner.
As the film opens, Charlie (Edward Burns) returns to town on the bus after an absence of three years. He was once Claudia’s lover, but ditched her without a farewell. Now he apparently hopes to pick up where they left off. He moves into his mother’s house; she has his number, and tells him to get a job. And then Michael, who was his best friend, comes over for more beer and conversation, and explains that he and Claudia are “together” now.
Will Claudia accept the dependable Michael? Or will she be swept off her feet once again by the flashier, more charismatic Charlie? “It’s different this time,” he tells her. “This time I need you. I love you.” He’s not the soul of eloquence, but she is willing to be persuaded.
The problem is, Charlie is an enigma. Where was he for three years? Why is he back? What are his skills, his plans, his strategies? His vision for the two of them is not inspiring: They’ll leave town and go to Florida, where he has no prospects, and “start over.” Still, Charlie paints a seductive picture.
Or does he? The film wants us to see Michael, the Bon Jovi character, as a boring, safe, faithful but unexciting choice. But I sort of liked him; Bon Jovi plays the role for its strengths, which involve sincerity and a certain bottom line of integrity. Charlie, on the other hand, is one of those men who believe that true happiness, for a woman, consists of doing what he wants. He offers Claudia not freedom, but the choice of living in his shadow instead of her own.
The story plays out during overcast days and chilly nights, in lonely barrooms and rented houses. Some small life is provided by Claudia’s family, which includes her mother (Blythe Danner) and her sister. The mother is convinced her husband, who has deserted her, will return some day. The sister is dating the local fishmonger. As the three women discuss the comings and goings of the men in their lives, they scheme like some of Jane Austen’s dimmer characters, for whom the advent of the right man is about the most a girl can hope for.