And here I thought every permutation of Holocaust movie had been done...until I watched "Bent" last night. Here is a film which tries many things and succeeds at several; I would have given it higher points for originality had it not been based on a play from which many of the best ideas seem to have come.
The film addresses the little-discussed effects of the Holocaust on the gay community of Germany. Max, played fearlessly by Clive Owen, is a dashing member of the gay community in Berlin; he lives with an immature yet sensual dancer who is given to fits of jealousy over Max's roving eye. The opening scene of the movie is set in an outdoor cabaret where girls with syringes for arms dance topless and boys in sparkling gloves vogue to the music of a drag queen played by Mick Jagger. (That scene inspired a list to come soon of the film scenes I would most like to drop in on.) After Max brings home a gay Nazi who is tracked down and murdered by his superiors, Max and his lover go on the run. They are caught, and Max is forced to kill his lover on a train to Dachau to prove that he is not gay. For this Max wears a yellow star instead of a pink triangle, having successfully convinced the Nazis that he is a Jew. Once at Dachau, he strikes up a hesitant friendship with an openly gay campmate and they begin to fall in love, in the worst place and the worst circumstances in the world. I don't think I need spoiler tags to tell you that this doesn't end well, but I will refrain from telling you exactly how.
The movie has many things going for it, but in the end is taken down a notch by some fairly glaring flaws. The performances are one of the film's many strengths; all the actors seem completely committed and manage to convey intense emotion without going over the top (which can be a problem with lesser-known Holocaust films). The script, written by the writer of the play on which the film was based, is of course of fairly high quality. The signature device of the play (which has been transplanted whole to the film) is a scene in which Max and his new love stand side by side, describing a sexual encounter with each other but never touching. As well as having obvious relevance to places such as Nazi Germany, Saudi Arabia and Texas, where gay men live in fear of touching each other openly, it echoes the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Many who feared catching this new and fatal disease had to be creative about their intimacy, which was what this extreme example brought to mind. The dialogue overlaps and caresses itself, and the actors handle this flawlessly. However, I couldn't help thinking that in film, many dialogue scenes are shot this way, with each actor doing close-up separately and the scene spliced together in editing as if it were a dialogue. The fragmented nature of film takes away from the intensity of this scene, which surely would have worked much better on the stage. Regardless, it is a moving scene and, as far as I know, the only one which has earned a film an NC-17 rating for sexual (but not profane) language.
Chief among the film's problems is the way in which its symbolism translates to a realistic environment. Apparently the play is to be done in a bare, Beckettian setting, which would make the events more allegorical in nature. Plopping the play into the real world makes some of the more dramatic moments feel histrionic, through no fault of the actors. It simply seems unlikely that the plot would fall into place quite so neatly and obediently in a world of real train cars, threadbare bunks, and dusty labor. Still, this is a movie quite unlike any other, and worth seeing for its attempt to illuminate what must be one of the last unexplored corners of Holocaust atrocities.
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