Amazon.com video review:
For those who like their love stories dipped in decadence, Liliana
Cavani's dark and disturbing 1974 drama--about a concentration camp
survivor
who fatefully comes face to face with her ex-Nazi captor and lover--has
held up quite well over the years despite its sensationalistic tone. It
helps that the mysterious,
cobra-eyed Charlotte Rampling plays the survivor, Lucia, and that the
unctuous and languid British actor, Dirk Bogarde, is former SS officer
Max, a now-benign night porter at the Vienna hotel where the pair
coincidentally collides. There is a haunted hollowness to these characters
that resigns them to relive the sordid past that tragically binds them.
Criterion's DVD offers the film in its best available condition, and the
color has been restored to enhance its symbolic significance. The Night
Porter uses landscape as character, and its desaturated tones evoke
memory of the
Holocaust and a shady 1950s Vienna plagued by post-World War II
guilt. In fact, this is a film full of shadows and shame, and Max and Lucia
are
victims of this frightening world in which nothing can be trusted and around
every corner lurk spies in their house of forbidden love. --Paula
Nechak
