pain and suffering

Charlotte Rampling has famously played a Nazi sex kitten


Charlotte Rampling plays Lucia Atherton, a concentration camp survivor who had an ambiguous relationship with Aldorfer. Flashbacks show Max tormenting Lucia, but also acting as her protector. In an iconic scene, Lucia sings a Marlene Dietrich song to the concentration camp guards while wearing pieces of an SS uniform...

(Marlene Dietrich was a German actress and singer)


Thirteen years after World War II, Lucia meets Aldorfer again; he is now the night porter at a Vienna hotel. There, they fall back into their sadomasochistic relationship.

(Sadism is pleasure in the infliction of pain or humiliation upon another person, while masochism is pleasure in receiving the pain.)


The film depicts the political continuity between wartime Nazism and post-war Europe and the psychological continuity of characters locked into compulsive repetition of the past. On another level it deals with the psychological condition known as Stockholm Syndrome.

(Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in abducted hostages, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger or risk in which they have been placed)


It also raises the issue of sleeper Nazi cells and their control... Simplistically it works on the level of two people in an uneasy yet inextricably bounded relationship but also that is very much in the context of the greater political malaise of the War and the many years following. It should also be noted that Cavani (writer/director) herself met several women who had survived the horrors of Concentration camps, and Lucia (Rampling) is not branded as jewish particularly probably to depict the plight of all women, and doubtless the pun on her name meaning light and St Lucia being the patron saint of the blind was deliberate also...

The film has been accused of mere sensationalism: film critic Roger Ebert calls it "as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering." Given the film's dark and disturbing themes and a somewhat ambiguous moral clarification at the end, The Night Porter has tended to divide audiences

Movie: Night Porter (Il Portiere di notte in Italian)

other pics of Charlotte Rampling late 60s