Hungry Hearts (2015)

Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Thriller

Hungryhearts

**/****
starring Adam Driver, Alba Rohrwacher, Roberta Maxwell
written and directed by Saverio Costanzo

by Walter Chaw Not the sequel to the Bruce Springsteen song I was hoping for, Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts is instead the moment at which I completely understand the appeal of Adam Driver. He’s Jude; one night, after a particularly unfortunate biological episode, he meets-cute peculiar Mina (Alba Rohrwacher), who’s forced to suffer the olfactory fallout with him. They move in together. She gets pregnant, and later we think back on the moment of conception with something like dread. Mina becomes increasingly difficult. She becomes the acolyte of various new-age schemes and trends, finding gurus to follow in the garbage she reads while their son fails to grow. Jude, frantic, sneaks away three times a day on various pretexts to feed his son meat. He’s afraid the boy will die. One night, Mina wakes Jude, in a scene Costanzo shoots with a fish-eye lens, and says, “My son threw up meat. Do you know anything about this?”–and then she shrinks out of frame like that giant fish in that one Faulkner story about the bear. Hungry Hearts is a bit of the Naturalism of the Faulkner. It’s a bit of the Gothic, too.

Brazilian Western (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

Posted in2013, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Brazil, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Western

Brazwest2

Faroeste caboclo
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Felipe Abib, Antonio Calloni, César Troncoso, Marcos Paulo
screenplay by Marcos Bernstein and Victor Atherino
directed by René Sampaio

by Jefferson Robbins If a few things fall too neatly into place in René Sampaio’s Brazilian Western–like beautiful Maria Lúcia (Isis Valverde) jumping into bed with fugitive João (Fabrício Boliveira), who just held her at gunpoint in her own bedroom–well, it’s a fable. That’s meant literally, since the film is adapted from a megahit ballad of roughly the same name: Legāio Urbana’s nine-minute barn-burner of calamity, bloodshed, love, and redemption spoke to something in the Brazilian psyche in 1987, charting João de Santo Christo’s fatal misadventures with the corrupt forces that kept a boot on the underclass. Sampaio’s adaptation has a lot to live up to in that respect, as well as in honouring the western genre to which the title nods. It winds up a Leone-ian Scarface of sorts, although the stakes are different–pot instead of coke, infatuation rather than the will to power, with imbalances of class and race at the forefront.

Aloha (2015)

Posted in2015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Aloha

**/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Angelo Muredda Few films have predicted their own failure as adroitly as Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, where Orlando Bloom’s wayward shoe designer foresees his imminent sacking by dubbing his new DOA product–a billion-dollar boondoggle–a “fiasco.” Elizabethtown is a fiasco, all right, but it has little on Aloha, which has to be the quintessential Cameron Crowe film, the one for the time capsule, in its baffling configuration of good intentions and bad execution–and its near-radioactive warmth in spite of it all. Like Elizabethtown, Aloha does us the courtesy of signposting its total structural collapse right in the text; and like Elizabethtown, it’s so earnest that it’s hard to look away even after the warning. This time the tell is in a sloppily-engineered climactic scene that sees the hero hacking into the satellite he’s just helped launch from the Hawaiian base he’s secured for the military, destroying the thing he’s put up in the air himself, for reasons barely known, by blasting it with a sonic cannon composed of all recorded sound in history. (This being a Cameron Crowe film, “all recorded sound in history” consists of sentimental movie moments from Crowe’s youth and snippets of Bob Dylan’s discography.) What better metaphor could there be for Aloha, a bad-idea cannon indiscriminately blasting mawkish sentiment and choice soundbites, and compromising its own structural integrity at every turn?

American Sniper (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, 2015, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, War

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***/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner, Luke Grimes
screenplay by Jason Hall, based on the book by Chris Kyle
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda After delivering the first funereal jukebox musical in Jersey Boys just last summer, Clint Eastwood returns to better-fitting material with American Sniper, his most muscular and dramatically charged work in years, for whatever that’s worth. The common thinking about Eastwood these days–at least, outside the critical circle that deems his every tasteful composition and mild camera movement a classical masterstroke–is that his internal compass for choosing projects has been off for a while, making him susceptible to the bad taste of undistinguished screenwriters. What’s interesting about American Sniper, which works from a dicey script by Jason Hall that’s always in danger of becoming either a rote action thriller meted out in shootouts or a rote antiwar melodrama about how veterans never quite make it back home, is how obstinately it resists this narrative. Contrary to the vision of Eastwood as an efficient director prone to gliding on autopilot, American Sniper shows him forging something tough and difficult to grasp out of what might have been on-the-nose material.

Cries and Whispers (1972) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

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Viskningar och rop
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Kari Sylwan, Liv Ullmann
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer Harriet Andersson first appears on screen a little more than three minutes into Cries and Whispers. Sven Nykvist’s camera looks at her from across the room as her features twist and twitch in an extraordinary series of contortions. It’s a remarkable image because it so compassionately and clearly conveys the human condition–the spirit’s status as long-term resident of a fleshy domicile with its particular shortcomings and irreversible dilapidations. It’s also almost immediately identifiable as an Ingmar Bergman image. That’s not just because Andersson is a Bergman stalwart, or because the European aspect ratio and the vintage texture and film grain help identify the time and place of the picture’s making. No, you can feel in this shot the cameraman’s patience, the actor’s single-mindedness, and the director’s clinical interest in her character’s experience. And at this point in his career, a woman in distress and under the microscope was Bergman’s métier.

Saint Laurent (2014)

Posted in2014, 2015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Biopic, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical

Saintlaurent

***/****
starring Gaspard Ulliel, Jérémie Renier, Louis Garrel, Helmut Berger
screenplay by Bertrand Bonello and Thomas Bidegain
directed by Bertrand Bonello

by Angelo Muredda Bertrand Bonello enters the postmodern biopic sweepstakes with Saint Laurent, no less than the third chronicle of the titular French designer and haute couture icon in as many years. With regrets to Pierre Thoretton’s understated but chilly L‘amour fou, which comes at its subject through the reminiscences of his lifelong professional and personal partner Pierre Berge, Bonello’s project is almost certainly the most fetching (thanks in no small part to costume designer Anais Romand), marrying a contemporary fixation on the limits of biographical storytelling with the sort of impressionist brushstrokes the Matisse devotee might have appreciated. In the wake of filmmakers as disparate as Todd Haynes and Abel Ferrara self-consciously toying with the limits of the biopic form, ostensibly killing dynamic subjects by pinning them to the wall, Saint Laurent isn’t as radical a work of genre subversion as some of its adherents claim, but it sure as hell is beautiful, channelling its subject’s hedonist spirit and delicate aesthetic sensibility in roughly equal measure.

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Stroszek

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Germany, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Stroszek

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Commentary A
BD – Image B Sound A- Commentary A
starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz, Wilhelm von Homburg
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw I love this film. I’m enthralled by it. And every time I revisit it, it has a new gift for me. Bruno S. plays the titular Stroszek, a street performer released from a two-year institutionalization and left to his own devices with hooker girlfriend Eva (Eva Mattes) and pal Mr. Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz). There’s a transparency to the performances that transcends naturalism: you sense that the actors are not only playing themselves (more so than usual), but also that they’re playing themselves as allegorical figures in a metaphor for their lives. It’s Spider, but it’s at once more and less expressionistic than David Cronenberg’s film–and while the long, quiet, empty reaches of living in the giant abandoned warehouse of a mind in flux is a constant melancholy the two films share, there is something in Stroszek, crystallized in the haunting image of a premature baby pawing at its bedding, that does more to traumatize the human condition. When the film’s heroic triumvirate flees Germany for the gilded shores of Wisconsin (“Everybody’s rich there”), in a migration that reminds a little of Aguirre’s doomed hunt for El Dorado, Stroszek is suddenly a picture about pilgrimage to a holy land that exists solely in the windy spaces conjured by the promise of westward expansion.

Inherent Vice (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in****/****, 2014, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

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****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston
screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon
directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Paul Thomas Anderson’s maybe-second, arguably third Thomas Pynchon adaptation after There Will Be Blood and The Master, Inherent Vice is the first official one, as well as the truest. It provides a Rosetta stone for Anderson’s career to this point, Pynchon’s work serving as a template for an artist crossing genres while holding true to a certain standard of intellectual rigour, a certain florid prosody, a specific interest in telling true the story of whatever the times may be. Inherent Vice also offers a framework for Anderson’s intimidating film craft, his particular way of marrying image with sound, and the extraordinary shots–unbroken literally or rhythmically–that have made his movies as much pop poetry and music as narrative. Consider the reunion sequence in Punch-Drunk Love that finds Shelley Duvall singing Harry Nilsson on the soundtrack while Anderson rocks the camera like a baby in a cradle, or the wordless opening sequence of There Will Be Blood, with Jonny Greenwood’s terrifying, Kubrick-ian Dawn of Man overture rattling the soundscape. Or the Gravity’s Rainbow opening of The Master as our hero, on a boat, sways in another swaddle far above his madding crowd. Remarkable stuff. Cinema as high art, doing things that only cinema can do.

Ex Machina (2015)

Posted in2015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Exmachina

**½/****
starring Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac
written and directed by Alex Garland

by Angelo Muredda Say this much for Alex Garland: there’s an early stretch in Ex Machina, his auspicious directorial debut, where one wonders if one is seeing something relatively new. That’s meant not as a backhanded compliment but as an acknowledgement that good sci-fi is hard to come by, and that impressive world-building rarely segues into sophisticated storytelling grounded in novel ideas. For probably long enough to give it a decent shelf-life, Ex Machina passes the genre sniff test about as well as its android heroine–an artificially intelligent being with the body of a European rising star–clears her own trial, a personal variation on the Turing test. If the film dips from there into a familiar, smart-alecky noir about bad men and the women they can’t control, at least credit it for deferring the inevitable.

The Water Diviner (2014)

Posted in2015, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Turkey, War

Waterdiviner

*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Yilmaz Erdogan, Cem Yilmaz
screenplay by Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios
directed by Russell Crowe

by Walter Chaw The Water Diviner is premium schmaltz. Connoisseurs of such will find its top-shelf qualities to include a Witness-like star-cross’d pas de deux; dead wives and sons; surrogate wives and sons; surrogate father figures fighting, Footloose-like, against oppressive cultures; a Fisher King rescue from insanity; and enough war-movie boilerplate to choke a War Horse. Its direct antecedent is of course Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, except that Gallipoli is something of a masterpiece that balances its war journal with strong characters and a tragic ending in keeping with its grim subject matter. The Water Diviner, on the contrary, is a bodice-ripper chock-a-block with hole-digging and sky-beseeching, along with an Outback dust-storm that points, if the trailers for Mad Max: Fury Road are any indication, to this year’s most inexplicable evidence of zeitgeist.

Don’t Look Now (1973) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

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****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania
screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier
directed by Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is about looking, about ways of seeing and layers of understanding. It’s about memory and its intrusion into and influence on current states of being. It’s about the impossibility of faith or love or human relationships to illuminate truth; or it’s about how faith and love and human relationships are the only truth. It shows images out of order, presenting them in ways that will only make sense once the gestalt in which the images exist becomes clear. In every way, Don’t Look Now is designed for multiple viewings. The film warns that a life spent unexamined will end brutally and nonsensically. Without context, there is nothing, but context is nigh impossible before the end. It’s something William Carlos Williams would understand.

Run All Night (2015)

Posted in2015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Runallnight

*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris
screenplay by Brad Ingelsby
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night fulfills every requirement of the Liam Neeson subgenre of elder-vengeance while simultaneously completing the Grumpy Old Men trilogy in an unexpected way. It’s a hollow stylistic exercise that mainly exposes how good We Own the Night was, and while some slight comparisons have been to Phil Joanou’s underestimated State of Grace, really the only thing Run All Night resembles is everything else Neeson has decided will be his legacy since the first Taken movie about seven years ago. What’s most painful, I think, is how consistently great Neeson is at doing this one thing over and over again. He makes it hard, in other words, to stop wishing he’d go back to doing something worthy of him.

Cinderella (2015)

Posted in2015, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

Cinderella15

**½/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Lily James, Richard Madden, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Chris Weitz
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw Notable in however these things are notable for not being an Ever After revisionist Cinderella but rather a fairly straightforward adaptation of the Disney animated version, Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella would be interesting to look at next to Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, if only to see how Helena Bonham Carter morphs from immortal beloved to Fairy Godmother. (Answer? Awkwardly.) It’s not a bad conversation to have, actually, in a film that finds a great deal of depth in Cate Blanchett’s Barbara Stanwyck take on Lady Tremaine, the evil stepmother. In a nicely-played scene, she stops just short of confessing that the reason she resents Cinderella (Lily James) is because, for women, society abhors the aged and venerates the youthful. It’s not deep (and maybe it’s not meant to be), but it does add a little bitter undertaste to its “happily ever after.”

Penny Dreadful: The Complete First Season (2014) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2014, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Television

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Image A Sound A Extras C
“Night Work,” “Séance,” “Resurrection,” “Demimonde,” “Closer Than Sisters,” “What Death Can Join Together,” “Possession,” “Grand Guignol”

by Bryant Frazer One of the hallmarks of contemporary remix culture is derivative artistic ventures that seek shortcuts to the id, making a playful, self-aware succotash of genre tropes in lieu of inventing new cosmologies. Cleverly done, the approach can yield brainy ruminations on form and content along the lines of Alan Moore’s Watchmen or alternate-universe joyrides like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds. When the endeavour is shabby and commercial, executed with no love, you end up with smug mediocrities like The Cabin in the Woods or smarmy trash like Dracula Untold. (Nobody–not George Lucas, not Ridley Scott–seems to grok less about what made the original properties they’re trying to exploit great in the first place than the fools charged with revitalizing the monster franchises at Universal.) Somewhere in the middle, you get a project like “Penny Dreadful”, a monster mash-up set in late-Victorian London that earns no originality points for series creator John Logan, best known for his screenwriting credits on Hugo, Skyfall, and Rango. Named after the pulpy serial publications that sold in old London for a penny each, his show is even more specifically derivative of latter-day pastiches like Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula than it is of their own 19th-century sources. Still, at its best, his knock-off has an engaging flamboyance that makes it, if not must-see TV, at least agreeable popcorn drama.

Focus (2015)

Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Will Smith

Focus2015

**/****
starring Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Rodrigo Santoro, Gerald McRaney
written and directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

by Walter Chaw The world’s most polite heist/caper/con-man Charade thing, which feels it’s finally time to continue that death trudge towards completion of a Matchstick Men trilogy, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra’s Focus is a studiedly-inoffensive star vehicle for Will Smith that’s interesting only because of Will Smith’s casual attitude towards miscegenation. Easy to say that in 2015 a black guy with a white girl isn’t that big a deal, but I still can’t think of too many examples where a superstar like Smith is willing to repeatedly cast himself opposite a cross-racial leading lady. Smith is even a producer of Will Gluck’s intriguing Annie, which, in addition to being a very strange bookend to the surveillance-state nightmare of The Dark Knight, features at its centre an interracial love story between characters played by Jamie Foxx and Rose Byrne. I’m spending a lot of time on this, because Focus, aside from the sexy shenanigans of Smith’s expert con-man Nicky and his ingénue protégé Jess (Margot Robbie) and the fact of their race-mixing in a mainstream, medium-big studio flick, isn’t about anything and isn’t otherwise that interesting about it.

Watership Down (1978) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

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Richard Adams’s Watership Down
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams
directed by Martin Rosen

by Walter Chaw Unsentimental and terrifying and set against lovely, John Constable-esque watercolour backgrounds, Martin Rosen’s adaptation of the Richard Adams novel Watership Down arose in that extended lull between Disney’s heyday and its late-Eighties resurrection. (This period also saw, in addition to Rosen’s film of Adams’s The Plague Dogs, Rankin & Bass’s The Last Unicorn and Ralph Bakshi’s most productive period, which included 1978’s The Lord of the Rings.) Watership Down points to the dwindled potential for American animation to evolve into what anime has become: a mature medium for artistic expression of serious issues. A shame that this flawed piece is possibly the pinnacle of animation’s ambition on these shores, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life notwithstanding.

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)

Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

50shades

**/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jennifer Ehle
screenplay by Kelly Marcel, based on the novel by E.L. James
directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson

by Walter Chaw In an age of post-satire, where Sarah Palin has a cognitive episode on every channel and prints the take, where it's actually become impossible to mock something that's constantly in the process of taking itself down, enter E. L. James's radioactively-popular "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy, which creeps under the low bar set by key inspiration Stephenie Meyer. It all sets the stage of course for Idiocracy's most popular movie in the land being a continuous loop of an ass, sometimes farting. That's what makes the first hour of Sam Taylor-Johnson's film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey actually something like a revelation. She, along with screenwriter Kelly Marcel, has somehow managed to turn the excrescent source material–excrescent not for its eroticism (I like me a good Henry Miller any day of the week), but for its illiteracy–into a satire of that section in the used bookstore where you can buy a grocery-bagful for a $1.00, trade-ins welcome. The picture does the impossible: It makes fun of something so stupid and anti-lovely it was already making fun of itself, and for at least that first hour, I understood completely the camp/communal value of Fifty Shades of Grey. And then there's another hour.

Looking: The Complete First Season (2014) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

Posted in2014, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance, Television

Looking2

Image A Sound A Extras C
“Looking for Now,” “Looking for Uncut,” “Looking at Your Browser History,” “Looking for $220/Hour,” “Looking for the Future,” “Looking in the Mirror,” “Looking for a Plus-One,” “Looking Glass”

by Jefferson Robbins Not fair to call it a gay “Girls”, in part because it dodges the character grotesques of that show in favour of…a less provocative mix of personality types, shall we say. That’s a polite way of calling Michael Lannan’s HBO dramedy “Looking” boring by comparison–and finally, prettily, boring on its own merits, however better-lensed and more grounded in real personal motivations it might be than Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow’s zeitgeister. Handsome gay men abroad in San Francisco’s fully actuated sexual culture is a fine launchpad; Lannan and collaborator Andrew Haigh treat their core trio of characters with respect and care; and the cast is all-pro, managing the mini-crises thrown their way as if they actually matter. But while there’s no there there in either “Looking” or “Girls”, at least the latter goes big and madcap enough to tempt continued viewing; it’s not afraid to entertain, or to anger. The curtain-fall on “Looking”‘s first season incites little hunger for the second.

A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

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***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, David Harbour, Boyd Holbrook
screenplay by Scott Frank, based on the novel by Lawrence Block
directed by Scott Frank

by Bryant Frazer First, let’s be clear about what kind of movie A Walk Among the Tombstones is. The film’s signature image is that of a blonde woman, nude or nearly nude, atop a white bed. A man caresses her slowly, runs his fingers through her hair, and nuzzles her face. If we watch closely, we eventually notice that she cringes at his touch. As new camera angles afford us a better look at the tableau, we notice the bed is covered in plastic. Two men are watching the woman. And her mouth is taped closed. The newly disturbing scene is photographed with a luxe aesthetic–soft light, lush bokeh, off-axis shot compositions–that suggests a commercial for pharmaceuticals, if not early-’90s Playboy Channel programming. The intended irony is clear enough, but the coyness makes the scene ugly. After a close-up on the woman’s dirty feet, the camera cuts to a view of her face, looking directly into the camera, as her body is being pushed at, rhythmically, from just outside the frame. The question, then, is whether she’s being raped, dismembered, or eviscerated.

The Night Porter (1974) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Italy, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

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**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti
screenplay by Liliana Cavani and Italo Moscati
directed by Liliana Cavani

by Bryant Frazer The Night Porter is one of the most bizarre psychodramas in the history of film, using the Holocaust as a dreamy, abstract backdrop for a toxic romance between a former SS officer (Dirk Bogarde) and the “little girl” (Charlotte Rampling) he isolated, humiliated, and raped in a Nazi concentration camp. If that sounds absolutely outrageous, that was surely part of the design. This wasn’t Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS or another in the short-lived cycle of Nazi-themed exploitation pictures. This was Italian director Liliana Cavani’s first English-language feature, and Bogarde and Rampling were English-language stars. In order to recoup, The Night Porter would need to be provocative. Cavani delivered on that score. European critics are said to have taken the movie’s sociopolitical context seriously, but upon arrival in New York its outré imagery generated a mix of critical scorn and mockery that, ironically, helped earn it big returns at the box office. (Vincent Canby’s pan deriding it as “romantic pornography” was highlighted in the advertising.) If you know nothing else about the film, you probably know its signature image–Rampling, wearing black leather gloves and an SS officer’s cap, her bare breasts framed by the suspenders holding up a pair of baggy pinstriped trousers, tossing a Mona Lisa smile at the camera. That key art has kept The Night Porter in demand for more than forty years now, from arthouses and VHS tapes to DVD and now Blu-ray releases under the Criterion imprimatur.