THE NIGHT PORTER Wenn ich mir was Wunschen Durfte MARIA FARANTOURI

Thirteen years after WWII, a concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) and her Nazi tormentor (Dirk Bogarde), currently the night porter at a Vienna hotel, meet again and fall back into their sadomasochistic relationship. The Night Porter is a provocative and problematic film. Made in 1974 by Italian director Liliana Cavani, it can be seen as an exercise in perversion and exploitation of the Holocaust for the sake of sensationalism. On the other hand, a closer reading of this Englishlanguage psychological thriller suggests a dark vision of compelling characters doomed by their World War II past. When the film was released in the United States, critical response was hardly favorable; indeed, Vincent Canbys New York Times review was nothing short of scathing. Under the headline The Night Porter Is Romantic Pornography, he began, Let us now consider a piece of junk. And some viewers were disturbed that a woman director was portraying a female concentration camp survivor as th