The Night Porter. Liliana Cavani. 1973

I think this is a really strange film and it has left me with an equivocal feeling. I don't think I could easily say whether I liked it or not and that's probably a very good thing. Aesthetically, it's dark and lugubrious. It's closer to Visconti's 'Death In Venice' than Bertolucci's 'Last Tango In Paris' (with which it seems to have been frequently compared). I suspect that the comparison with Bertolucci has to do with the subject matter: a sado-masochistic relationship between a Nazi concentration camp guard (Dirk Bogarde) and a young Jewish girl (Charlotte Rampling) is revived after the event to deleterious result. Yet the fascination / disgust with sex seems to have more to do with a Freudian repetitive compulsion than shock value or mere titillation. Half way through the film, I decided that the key to the central relationship was the fact that Bogarde's character is embroiled in a group who refuse to admit any guilt at the same time as knowing they are guilty of perpetuating atrocity on a mass scale; in the context of guilt and denial, his relationship with Rampling's character becomes one of both punishment and a way of working himself out of guilt. In many ways, Rampling's character is the more controversial of the two as she returns to the man who has made her a victim in more ways than one. In the extras, Rampling confesses that it was her character that sat most uncomfortably with contemporary viewers because it was thought that nobody would ever do such a thing...

The film is affecting because it explores the grey area between good and evil which is continually denied.