Liliana Cavani
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7.0 Il Portiere di Notte (1974) 5.0 Ripley's Game 5.0 L’ordine Del Tempo | Links: |
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Liliana Cavani (Italy, 1933)
debuted with
the historical documentaries Francesco d'Assisi (1966),
an apocryphal hagiography intended to show the saint as a sort of contemporary dissenter,
and
Galileo (1968),
on the Brechtian conflict between science and religion,
both made for television.
The political allegory I Cannibali (1970), loosely based on Sophocles' "Antigone", is a metaphor about state repression and youth protest: the streets of a metropolis are littered with the bodies of rebels fallen during the riots, and the authorities forbid the bourgeois from burying them; a girl, aided by a stranger, defies the ban to bury her brother; together they clandestinely continue the burial work until they are captured by the police; the girl’s fiancé ends up in a mental institution for defending them, and the two insurgents are martyred; the city’s youth then take to the streets en masse to continue their work. The austere fable drawn from mythology recalls Pasolini’s Medea, while the fantasociological take on authoritarianism evokes Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. L’Ospite/ The Guest (1971), an investigative film on mental hospitals, tells of a madwoman’s difficult reintegration into society. The Tibetan biopic Milarepa (1973) contrasts the mystical experience of the Tibetan poet and magician with the arid modern technological civilization: the story is told by a young man to a dying motorist and follows all the attempts the hermit makes to satisfy his yearning for the infinite (from black magic to transfiguration). Her main film, Il Portiere di Notte/ The Night Porter (1974), abandons spiritualism and ventures into the darker regions of the human psyche; exposing the abhorrent Nazi ideology and providing a Freudian analysis of sadomasochism, the film cultivates an unsettling climate of ambiguity. The night porter of a Viennese hotel is a former Nazi officer in charge of a concentration camp; when a former Jewish deportee, whom he tortured and forced to become his lover, arrives at the hotel, a morbid attraction is reestablished between executioner and victim; they barricade themselves in his house and gradually recreate the life of the camp: he tortures her and she indulges in unrestrained sensuality; the porter’s former comrades, determined to erase every trace of their past crimes, besiege the couple mercilessly; when exhausted, they dress in each other’s uniforms (Nazi uniform and white shirt) and go outside holding hands; on the doorstep, they are mowed down by gunfire from a former male lover of the porter. Hitchcock presides over the secret Nazi conspiracy, Losey over the master-servant relationship, Bergman over the exhausting ritual of mutual annihilation, Buñuel over the bourgeois’ self-destructive fervor (with literary citations from de Sade and Dostoevsky), guiding this raw fable on the crisis of the couple. La Pelle/ The Skin (1981), adaptated from Curzio Malaparte's novel, is an aberrant, abject reportage on the miseries of the rear lines during the liberation of Naples. To save their skins, the population stoops to every depravity: smuggling German prisoners, trading women and children, stealing tanks, paid virginity exhibitions, etc. In the background there unfolds the tender idyll between a young American soldier and the nurse who assisted him, with minor incidents adding ambiguous tones: an American tank crushes a celebrating Italian. Cavani’s aggressive tonal style goes beyond historical fresco to explore a synthesis of Hollywood genres (horror, war, melodrama). Hers is a shock-inducing cinema that does not spare repulsive and traumatizing scenes. A raw reflection on the survival instinct. The director seeks in the hyperrealism of degradation and in the aesthetics of extremity the explanation for the existential torment of modern civilization. Stylistically, she increasingly favors ensemble spectacle over any particular message. Oltre la Porta/ Beyond the Door (1982) is a story about possessive love drawing on the Hitchcockian thriller and the more traditional exotic melodrama of Hollywood while always retaining features of brutal cynicism and dark sadomasochistic sexuality: a tour guide in Marrakesh frequently visits her lover (Mastroianni) in prison and gradually discovers that he is incarcerated (though innocent) for having allegedly killed the wife who is the girl’s mother, and that he is also the girl’s biological father; the incestuous relationship continues morbidly passionate: she practically confines him to have him entirely for herself whenever she wishes; a sudden love and the subsequent marriage seem to liberate the young woman from sexual slavery, but as soon as the father is released, they fall back into vice. Interno Berlinese/ The Berlin Affair (1985) is based on Junichiro Tanizaki's novel "Quicksand". Later, she became mainly a director of operas. She still directed the films Francesco (1989), Dove Siete? Io Sono qui/ Where Are You? I'm Here (1993) and Il Gioco di Ripley/ Ripley's Game (2002), an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel.
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