By Stephanie Bunbury
Charlotte Rampling, left, and Liliana Cavani at the Venice Film Festival in August.Credit: Getty Images
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Liliana Cavani is best known outside Italy for her seminal 1974 film The Night Porter, a brilliantly wrought (arguably overwrought) portrait of a sado-masochistic relationship between a Nazi concentration camp guard played with elaborate menace by Dirk Bogarde and a teenage prisoner, a waifish Charlotte Rampling. Its portrayal of perverse eroticism caused an uproar. In Europe it was almost banned. In America, it was slated by the most respected critics as Nazi porn.
Recently restored, The Night Porter remains the subject of heated debate. Is it revelatory and taboo-crunching, or twisted and politically reprehensible? Or, indeed, both? Cavani’s defenders at the time included Bernardo Bertolucci, who had also recently addressed the fascist psyche in The Conformist. Along with Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the feisty female director of The Night Porter was seen to be in the front rank of the Italian New Wave.
Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter.Credit: Getty Images
Cavani is now 90, although anyone meeting her would take her for at least a decade younger. She has just made her first film in 20 years, which the ticking of the clock suggests – although you wouldn’t want to put money on it – will be her last. It screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival last month, where Cavani also received a Golden Lion for her life’s work in film. Rampling was on hand to present it.
“In a certain sense, you could say both Liliana Cavani and I have been defined by The Night Porter,” Rampling told the first-night audience in a passionately partisan speech. “She showed us – in its original, etymological, radical sense – what is monstrous … She turned her camera toward the beast, straight at it, eyes-wide, surrounding it to understand it, to recognise it when it returns.” The first-night audience responded with a standing ovation.
Reviews for the veteran’s new film, especially from the Italian press, were less reverent. The Order of Time certainly addresses a suitably terminal subject for a swansong – the end of the world – albeit couched within a kind of Big Chill for middle-aged Italians. Several haute-bourgeois couples, a few of them former partners who have since swapped, gather for their regular summer holiday, arguing, eating and partying to old people’s music. Meanwhile, an asteroid hurtles towards Earth.
One of the guests, Enrico (Edoardo Leo) is an eminent physicist who is intermittently on the phone to his American colleagues, checking the asteroid’s progress. He gives it a one-in-20 chance of destroying the planet, adding that the odds are narrowing as it gets closer.
You might think that would focus the collective mind, but only Enrico and the Peruvian maid, who is following the news on some crackpot millenarian website, are properly afraid. Everyone else is focused on the coming 50th birthday celebration for their hostess Elsa (Claudia Gerini), their various past and present romantic intrigues and on working out what bon mot they will say next, given that the conversation pit is a highly competitive space.
“I imagined many things; everyone would have a different reaction. We come face to face with life, while usually, we follow a daily routine and do not stop to reflect on our existence,” says Cavani. The thing is, she tells a masterclass in Venice, we can’t worry about dealing with the worst possible things. “Because the thing that is worse than the worst thing – you can’t know when it might happen.”
Friends gather as an asteroid approaches Earth in The Order of Time.
Cavani came face to face with the worst things as a young documentary filmmaker, researching material for the series she made for RAI, Italy’s national television network, on the Third Reich and Stalin. She was a child during World War II; she remembers hearing the crack of bombs without feeling any fear.
“Then I studied ancient literature at the university so, in fact, I knew more about the Peloponnesian Wars from the 5th century BC than I did about the Second World War. I had to open my eyes – and I was astonished by what I saw, horrendous images every day.” Her voice trembles slightly at the memory. “So that was my second degree.”
As a creator of fiction, her guiding lights were gloomy Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and Italian Vittorio De Sica, who made the heart-wrenching Bicycle Thieves.
“Making documentaries on the most devastating war in history prevented me from making lighter cinema later,” she says. The starting point for The Night Porter was Women of the Resistance (1965), for which she interviewed partisan fighters. One was a teacher who took holidays every year in Dachau, where she had been imprisoned. Another, who had been in Auschwitz, said she could not forgive the Nazis for making her “discover a part of myself capable of doing things I never thought I would do”. What they were, she wouldn’t say.
Fifty years after The Night Porter, The Order of Time shows Cavani still wrestling with Italy’s own fascist legacy, putting her anxieties in the mouths of her characters. Historian Giulia (Francesca Inaudi) observes with asperity that if anyone refers to the Nazi concentration camps in an academic context, some wise owl will warn them to be aware that there must be an allowance for doubt, “as if there had been no witnesses or photographs taken!”
Claudia Gerini and Alessandro Gassmann in The Order of Time.
References to climate change highlight another truth she sees denied by those who find it politically or financially inconvenient. Another variety of denial is brewing in the mind of Viktor (Richard Sammel) – the German technocrat among these Italian liberals – who is relying on Bloomberg’s running market indices to get him through Armageddon. The financial markets, he points out, are surging. And the market deals in facts! That’s where the real truth lies!
Cavani’s primary concern, however, is with ideas of time – its mutability, elasticity and speedy passage – inspired, according to the credits, by a widely admired book of essays by physicist Carlo Rovelli. Sometimes, says Cavani, she will read or see something that leaves her writing not a complete literary response, but a page of arguments; so it was when she read Rovelli’s book, also called The Order of Time.
She is intrigued by Rovelli’s observations about the arbitrary way we mark time in order to make it manageable: measuring it on clocks, dividing it into slabs – “before Christ” or “the 18th century” – and then pegging it to events that mark its passage. “Time doesn’t have a stable figure in itself. In itself, it doesn’t mean anything, except in relation to something that happened. We all agree that it passes, but we don’t go further,” she muses. Rovelli himself acted as a consultant on the project.
Working these ideas into a screenplay, directing actors on set – she still relishes all of it. Cavani has had a long and vigorous career, as she reminded the Venice festival when she observed how few women had stood where she was, holding her Golden Lion. She has a huge body of risky, visceral work, including a modern reworking of the Antigone story, The Year of the Cannibals (1969); The Skin (1981), which picks up on The Night Porter’s concern with survival and degradation, this time in post-war Italy; and Ripley’s Game (2002) with John Malkovich at his most saturnine. She has also made three films about the life of St Francis of Assisi, who remains a touchstone. None has had the enduring impact of The Night Porter but then, very few films have. And who knows? She may not be finished yet.
The Order of Time screens as part of the Italian Film Festival, Sydney, Sep 19-Oct 18; Melbourne, Sep 21-Oct 18; and Brisbane, Sep 27-Oct 25. http://italianfilmfestival.com.au
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