The Night Porter: Nazi porn or daring arthouse eroticism?

Movie romances traditionally have what’s called a “meet cute”, that clinching moment when a couple-to-be first bump into one another. It would be hard, though, to think of a meet less cute than the one in The Night Porter, Liliana Cavani’s erotic drama from 1974. When Max (Dirk Bogarde) encounters Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), they are in a concentration camp: he is an SS commandant and she is his teenage prisoner, crop-haired, ghostly and gaunt. A twisted relationship develops. She gives him sex and he brings her gifts, such as the head of a fellow prisoner in a box. It’s the little things that mean so much.

Twelve years after the end of the war, they are reunited when she checks into the Vienna hotel where he is manning the front desk. Soon it’s like the good old days all over again: they play sadomasochistic sex games, and Max tries to prevent Lucia being killed by his Nazi chums.

The film, which has been in and out of circulation over the decades, is released this month on Blu-ray in a 4K restoration, giving new audiences a chance to marvel at the high-wire performances, rinky-dink dubbing and sustained mood of maudlin kitsch. They can also decide whether this is a chamber piece of singular intensity or a ghoulish dalliance with fascist porn. Or possibly both. Holocaust survivor Primo Levi called the film “beautiful and false” and said “it has nothing to do with the camps”; while the academic Jörg Heiser wrote in 2010 that Cavani turns “concentration-camp reality” into “a playground for Nazi chic”.

Opinion at the time was divided. The film was treated largely with respect in Europe but savaged by US critics, with Pauline Kael in the New Yorker calling it “humanly and aesthetically offensive”. The US distributor, Joseph E Levine, exploited the furore by taking out a newspaper spread featuring hostile notices. “Selling it on the strength of its bad reviews,” said Vincent Canby, surprised to find that his own hatchet job in the New York Times was being used to flog tickets.

Cavani was not pleased either. “It was misleading,” the 87-year-old director tells me from Rome. “It damaged the reputation of the film. It was seen as a sexual work and that’s not at all what I wanted to do.” Unsavoury offers began landing on her desk. “Some producers proposed to me that I make a porn movie,” she says, clutching her forehead. “I said, ‘You’re completely crazy. No way.’ They wanted Nazi porn!”

It’s true that the film has always had a strong whiff of the taboo. I first saw it at the age of 15 at the delightfully insalubrious Scala cinema in London, where it could be found in outre double bills with the likes of Salon Kitty, one of the “Nazi porn” projects that Cavani turned down. A friend had told me that The Night Porter showed people having sex on broken glass, which seemed to me reason enough to pay the £2.50 ticket price. As it turned out, he was exaggerating. Though Max and Lucia do crawl on jagged shards, and fight over the sticky fragments of a broken jam jar, there is no glass-based intercourse, strictly speaking.

Jane Giles, the Scala’s former programmer, remembers The Night Porter as a reliable money-spinner for the repertory cinema. “It appeared 23 times between 1981 and 1992,” she says. “That makes it a real Scala regular. It was part of a trend that started in the 1970s of sexually extreme Euro arthouse films, which put it in the Scala sweet spot. These were films that were slow to come to home entertainment, and so weren’t widely available.”

It was also part of a wave of Italian pictures confronting fascism in a sexualised context: Visconti’s The Damned (Bogarde and Rampling again), Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Pasolini’s Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom. “Germany was doing it, too,” Giles points out. “But what’s different is that Italy was more like the wild west when it came to censorship and classification. What you got was this confluence of Italian film-makers dealing with their country’s fascist tendencies, combined with much freer, more explicit imagery.”

The Night Porter still faced legal obstacles at home – a delegation of Italian film-makers, including Bertolucci, successfully challenged efforts to ban it. While the movie retains a disreputable air, however, its origins are anything but. Kael in the New Yorker was way clear of the mark, for instance, when she surmised that the film probably “came out of idle speculation: ‘Gee, I bet there were people sexually enslaved by the Nazis.’” In fact, Cavani, whose grandparents were part of the anti-fascist movement, had spent years making documentaries about the war.

One of those was Women of the Resistance, a 1965 study of partisan fighters, during which she interviewed two women whose stories inspired The Night Porter: a teacher who took holidays each year in Dachau, where she had been imprisoned, and another woman whose family urged her to forget her experiences at Auschwitz. “I asked what it was that she could not forgive the Germans for,” Cavani recalls. “She said, ‘They made me discover a part of myself capable of doing things I never thought I would do.’ I asked, ‘What was it?’ She didn’t answer.”

Cavani wrote the treatment for The Night Porter in the early 70s. The budget was tight – the production ran out of money halfway, and shooting was suspended while additional funds were raised. Surprisingly for such a dour film, the mood on set was merry. “There was a really nice atmosphere,” the director says. “It was light, all the actors got along. Charlotte had just had a baby, and she took him on set with a nanny.”

Cavani has described the relationship between Max and Lucia as “beautiful”. In what way? “There was an attraction which marked Lucia for life,” she says. “When she and Max meet again, the flame has not faded. She was very young and disoriented by him. She was bowled over. She believed he desired her for who she was. And, despite everything, there was sincerity in his feelings. In its own way, theirs is a romantic relationship.”

I confess to her that I can’t share this view of the film. Lucia was a child when they met. She was abused, exploited, terrified. How can what she feels for Max be love? Cavani smiles patiently. “We mustn’t generalise. Cupid shoots his arrows in random directions, and these two must have been struck. If Cupid’s arrow hits you, there is nothing you can do. Let’s be honest, nobody can really define love.”

A crackling video call conducted through an interpreter may not be the best way to debate the nuances of abuse and control, so I ask Giles later what she makes of Cavani’s comments. “I’m with you on your reading of the relationship,” she says, “but I do understand what Liliana is saying. She’s found a language with which to describe her work. She’s a provocateur, and there’s an energy which allows her to take on that sort of material. If Liliana saw it as a story of abuse rather than a romance, it would look completely different. It wouldn’t have Charlotte Rampling slithering around – she would be lying on the floor, weeping and covered in sores.”

I think Giles is right. Cavani needed to invest in the purity of Max and Lucia’s relationship in order to make something so sincere, foolhardy and enduring. After all, she has directed many films, including Francesco, starring Mickey Rourke as St Francis of Assisi, and Ripley’s Game, with John Malkovich at his disdainful, withering best. And yet it is The Night Porter that we are still discussing.

While Cavani was overseeing this new restoration, she was asked whether she wanted to correct a cosmetic flaw in the original print. In the scene in which Max and Lucia struggle violently in a hotel room, a curly hair dangles from the top of the frame like a cedilla or a butcher’s hook. She refused to shoot another take at the time because Rampling, who had hurled herself into the scene, was exhausted. Offered the chance to fix it now, she declined once again.

She tells me she sees it as a test for the viewer. If you fixate on that hair, she says, “then the film is not worth anything. We should throw it away.” But it symbolises something else, I believe: a precious imperfection. Perhaps the flaws and misjudgments in The Night Porter have done as much to keep it alive as its flashes of brilliance. They help to explain why we’re watching the film so long after its initial release, and arguing over it still.

• The Night Porter is released by Cultfilms on Blu-ray and digital on 30 November.