The Night Porter. 1974 (Patreon)

Original title: Il portiere di notte

Liliana Cavani's film about the mutual obsession between an ex-Nazi officer and the young girl he favoured in a concentration camp is both brave and controversial; while sadomasochistic relationships were common onscreen at the time in both arthouses and the exploitation circuits, Cavani was criticised for placing her story of sexual transgression within the context of the Holocaust.

Vienna 1957: Maximilian Theo Aldorfer (Dirk Bogarde), a former SS officer, is working as a night porter in a Viennese hotel and trying to remain inconspicuous.

The quiet life he has tried so hard to build for himself after the war is interrupted when a famous conductor checks into the hotel with his lovely wife Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) in tow - Max's former prisoner and lover.

As her eyes lock with Max's, terror strikes each of them.

Memories come flooding back: he shoots at her for fun as she scurries around a small room, naked and shaven; he buys her a sleek, peach-coloured dress; she performs a Marlene Dietrich song in Nazi regalia; he presents her with another prisoner's head on a platter.

Back in the present, she's afraid of him because he makes her afraid of herself.

She can turn him into the police—she's a witness to countless war crimes—but she's gripped by something she can't explain.

She sends her husband ahead and says she'll meet him in a few days at his next concert date.

Alone in the hotel where Max works, she has only to wait.

Property is literally discarded when they reunite—he takes off her expensive earrings one by one and tosses them on the floor.

Their love is violent, vicious, primal.

She was a young girl when they met—this is the only way she has learned how to love; with the ferocity of a only chance before death.

Max's fellow Nazis are none too happy about the existence of this resurgent witness and order him to give her up.

Instead, he sequesters them in his apartment, draws the blinds, and orders in food.

While he's at work, one of the Nazis, Dr. Vogler, drops in on Lucia to try to convince her that Max needs to confess and be formally acquitted so that he can truly be 'cured' like the rest of his brethren.

She scoffs: "There is no cure." But Dr. Vogler disagrees:

Vogler: "It is you who are ill. Otherwise, you wouldn't be with somebody who made you..." Lucia: "That's my affair."

Vogler: "But nevertheless, your mind is disturbed. That's why you're here, fishing up the past."

Lucia: "Max is more than just the past."

The cyclical nature of trauma demands that we constantly poke at our wounds in an attempt to reassert control over them.

Lucia is a wealthy, glamorous woman married to a famous conductor, and yet she has allowed herself to be chained up in an ex-Nazi's apartment, eating rationed food with her bare hands.

Eventually, her motor functions cease altogether—he has to take her to the toilet, as she becomes too weak to move.

Max, whose life is now threatened by the Nazis, can no longer go out and must quit his job to stay with Lucia.

There is something damnably romantic about this Stockholm Syndrome tale, but both lovers will soon find themselves spiritually as well as physically malnourished.

The bond of bad behavior will not keep them immortal.