Il portiere di notte Free
- Genres: Drama
- Rating IMDb: 67
- Year: 1974
- Duration: 1:58
Summaries
After a chance meeting at a hotel in 1957, Holocaust survivor Lucia and Nazi officer Max, who tortured her, resume their sadomasochistic relationship.
Thirteen years after World War II, concentration camp survivor Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) and her tormentor Max (Sir Dirk Bogarde), currently the night porter at a Vienna hotel, meet again and fall back into their sado-masochistic relationship.
This movie examines the lives of former Nazi Max (Sir Dirk Bogarde) and his former captive Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), focusing on their dangerously twisted love affair that was initiated during the Nazi regime. Years later, after the war, the two have a chance encounter at a hotel where Max works as a concierge. Locking eyes in a crowded lobby, they are immediately sucked back into a dark and deadly past of which neither has ever been able to escape. As it turns out, Lucia is a bored housewife, married to an overworked businessman. Seeing Max after all these years calls to mind the memories of the heinous life of hers lived in captivity in the concentration camps of the war. It also brings forth a flood of confused emotions, brought about by the strange sexual relations she explored with her captor as a young woman. Max, equally distraught, fears being found out. Did she deliberately seek him out? Has she come to turn him in? It doesn't help that Max continues to keep ties and friendships with his fellow Nazi comrades. Have they something to do with this? He decides to confront her to find out. Pretty soon, the two resume their manic and doomed love affair, with conspirators slowly closing in on them.
1957. Max works as a night porter at the Hotel zur Oper in Vienna. During the war, he was an SS officer based in a concentration camp, where to his captors he posed as a doctor conducting research allowing him even more intrusive access. He has maintained connections with some of his Nazi colleagues, who have gone through the process of conducting mock trials one by one to expose weaknesses in their defense and when evidence, especially documents, which may incriminate them should and will be destroyed. Max's trial is the next one to be conducted. Upon simultaneously seeing each other, Max and a hotel guest, Lucia Atherton, the wife of an orchestra conductor for an opera company she who is following her husband on an opera tour, instantly recognize each other from the war years, when she was a prisoner at the same concentration camp. Although they try to avoid each other at all cost, they eventually do purposefully meet in their emotional need taking over, that need being their form of love for each other as they were in a sadomasochistic relationship at the time. The problem for them becomes Max's colleagues who would see Lucia as one of those threats to expose their past, such a threat which would need to be eliminated.
The dark and melancholy story of a former teenage Nazi concentration camp inmate, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), and the S.S. officer who was her torturer and lover, Max (Sir Dirk Bogarde), who accidentally meet again in a Vienna hotel in 1957, where Max works as the night porter. They resume their sadomasochistic relationship, although Max's former S.S. comrades have something different in mind for them. The story unfolds like a gruesome dance of death.
