Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

 

Cast: Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson, Olivier Rabourdin, Louise Chevillotte, Hervé Pierre, Clotilde Courau, David Clavel, Guillaine Londez. Screenplay: David Birke, Paul Verhoeven, based on a book by Judith C. Brown. Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie. Production design: Kaia Wyszkop. Film editing: Job ter Burg. Music: Anne Dudley. 

The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)

Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Giuseppe Addobbati, Isa Miranda, Nino Bignamini, Marino Masé, Amadei Amodio. Screenplay: Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati, Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani. Cinematography: Alfio Contini. Art direction: Nedo Azzini, Jean Marie Simon. Film editing: Franco Arcalli. Music: Daniele Paris.

I don't mind if a movie is offensive as long as what it makes me think and feel is more significant than what offends me. But Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, celebrated and damned for its offensive central story, the doomed love affair of a former SS officer and the concentration camp survivor whom he loved and abused, doesn't have enough substance to its characters to make its offensiveness meaningful or even credible. Despite performances of deep conviction by Dirk Bogarde as Max and Charlotte Rampling as Lucia, we still know them by their labels: ex-Nazi and masochistic victim. We can only infer why they were drawn together in the camp and why they remain drawn together years later, when he has become a night porter in a Viennese hotel that's a hotbed of decadent characters and she has married a celebrated orchestra conductor. What causes Lucia to give up this apparently successful marriage to degrade herself with this creep? And what's with this assortment of ex-Nazis who are destroying old records and eliminating witnesses to their wartime crimes -- other than, of course, a plot device that puts the lives of Max and Lucia in jeopardy. Why is there a long sequence about the ballet dancer who used to perform shirtless for the SS and now seems to be restricted to private performances for Max, who works the lights for the performances? Is it to evoke the homoerotic element of Nazism, itself a wrongheaded and offensive trope? Nothing in The Night Porter holds up to very close scrutiny. And yet it's a hypnotically watchable film that dares you to take it seriously as it unrolls, but just left me feeling jaded and unsatisfied when it was over.

45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years

Kate Mercer: Charlotte Rampling
Geoff Mercer: Tom Courtenay
Lena: Geraldine James
Sally: Dolly Wells
George: David Sibley

Director: Andrew Haigh
Screenplay: Andrew Haigh
Based on a story by David Constantine
Cinematography: Lol Crawley

Even in the longest marriages, couples still have something they can never share: those years before they met. Old failures, old loves, old sorrows are locked in the minds of each partner. This is the stuff of which stories are made, perhaps most brilliantly in James Joyce's story "The Dead." Fiction has ways of dealing with the emotional tension imposed on the present by a past that movies can't quite evoke except, conventionally, by flashbacks. Fortunately, Andrew Haigh doesn't do anything so conventional in 45 Years, his adaptation of the story "In Another Country" by David Constantine. Instead, he trusts his actors to carry the burden, revealing in the cinematic present the effects of the unshown past. Kate and Geoff are about to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary with a big party they had originally planned, we learn, for their 40th anniversary. It had to be postponed when Geoff went in the hospital for a coronary bypass. As they sit at the kitchen table a few days before the party, discussing the music they want played -- Geoff thinks it would be "kind of naff," i.e., corny, to play the Platters' "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," which they danced to at their wedding -- he opens a letter he has received from Switzerland. The body of a woman he traveled with, more than 50 years ago, has been found preserved in glacial ice. He's intrigued and disturbed by the discovery, including the fact that she would still look the way she did in her 20s, whereas he is old and gray. Geoff has never told Kate much about Katya and her death, so as the days go by and he continues to be obsessed by the news, she begins to pry information out of him and eventually makes her own discovery: that when she fell to her death Katya was pregnant. Haigh's determined restraint as a storyteller shines here. We never hear the truth spoken by any of the characters -- Kate doesn't confront Geoff with what she learns -- but only witness Kate as, looking through Geoff's things in the attic, she finds a cache of old slides. As she projects them on a sheet, we see what she sees: Katya with a contented look as she places her hand on her protruding belly. Because we know that Kate and Geoff are childless, this revelation has an even greater emotional impact. The tension between husband and wife grows, born of Kate's inquisitiveness and Geoff's reluctance to open himself up, but voices are scarcely raised. Fortunately, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay are more than equal to the task of showing how this half-century-old secret affects their lives. That we remember the catlike young Rampling, with her ice-blue eyes and wide sensuous mouth, and the weedy, angry young man that Courtenay often played also helps us contemplate the passage of time as we project those images onto the aging actors on the screen. Haigh ends on a masterstroke: Although Kate and Geoff have seemingly come to terms with the past, and he gives a speech at the party proclaiming his love for her, she has overruled his criticism and chosen "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" for their lead-off dance. And as the Jerome Kern-Otto Harbach song ends, we realize along with Kate, left alone on the dance floor, that she has chosen a song about lost love to celebrate their anniversary.

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