Out of the Night

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE NIGHT PORTER

Directed by LILIANA CAVANI Screenplay by LILIANA CAVANI andlTALOMOSCATI

During the war, the man who is now the night porter at the comfortable little Viennese hotel (Dirk Bogarde) was an SS officer at a concentration camp. During the war, the chic wife of the symphony conductor (Charlotte Rampling), who comes sweeping carelessly through his lobby, was, though scarcely more than a child, an inmate of the camp.

And they loved with a love that was more than love...

In fact, it was a classic case of sadomasochism. A suitable number of whipcracking, revolver-blasting flashbacks demonstrate how, in what were for them the good old days, he bent her to his will, and indeed awakened shameful impulses in her. And, it turns out 30 years after, the two are ready to take up right where they left off. But the night porter's old SS comrades fear that his bizarre behavior may draw police attention to their present underground organization. They force the couple to hole up in an apartment and then try to starve them into quiet surrender.

Much ugly footage is devoted to this last ordeal, during which she reverts completely to a childlike state, wearing Mary Janes and little white socks and requiring assistance when she goes to the toilet. One could perhaps say that Director Cavani's insistence--quite at odds with the film's promotional campaign, incidentally--that s-m is disgusting rather than titillating amounts to a moral stance of some sort. But that is about all you can say for this ponderous and phonily portentous film.

The essence of perverse obsessions is that those caught up in them do not live and learn. That makes such characters poor subjects for drama, though they are symbolically useful if you insist on believing that the world is nothing but a madhouse--in itself a banal and not very useful viewpoint. It could be argued that the true immorality of The Night Porter lies in its implicit trivialization of a historical tragedy as enormous as the mass holocaust, turning it into a convenient "explanation" for a psychopathic horror show as unedifying as one is ever likely to witness at the movies. "Richard Schickel

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