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Il portiere di notte (1974)
Rate:
3
Viewed:
4/21
4/21:
Known as The Night Porter, Il portiere di notte is a bleak, dreary, and pointless exercise of European cinema.
This crapfest took me a week to complete; I thought of it as a fantastic sleeping pill. What a hard movie for me to stay
awake due to having neither focus nor direction. I failed to see the point, no matter how long I stayed
with it, and ultimately, there wasn't any to begin with.
In truth, Il portiere di notte is Closet Land all over again; this time, it's Dirk
Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling. Given the plot (or lack thereof) centers around a woman who's mentally tortured by a male, the
most astounding fact is that both films were handled by a female director.
I've seen Charlotte Rampling in many pictures, and she acts virtually the same with a great deal of rigidity. I was somewhat
under the impression this might be her best work. Well, the verdict is: there's no hope because
Charlotte Rampling is a baaaaad actress. As Lucia, she pretends to think and feel but is just going through her
scenes as painlessly as possible. Dirk Borgarde looks silly as well.
Speaking of the Holocaust survivors, I won't be surprised if they objected to being used this way for an arthouse picture and
thus dismissed Il portiere di notte as "absurd." It doesn't help when the filmmakers decided to take advantage of Nazism with
S&M tendencies. By the way, the makeup job of many who are supposed to be in a pallor state is disastrous.
All in all, controversial and routinely lambasted by critics, Il portiere di notte is terrible.