UK, 1997 Director: Sean Mathias
Stars: Clive Owen, Lothaire Bluteau, Mick Jagger, Ian McKellen
Martin Sherman's acclaimed 1979 play, "Bent", where two gay Dachau inmates decide that real escape occurs within and explore their love through clandestine word-only sex with each other, always seemed a little over rated to me. The story romanticises concentration camp victims and even implies that fascist torture can be good for you as it will force you look deep inside and discover heart-warming existential truths before you end your physical and psychic suffering by throwing yourself on the nearest electric fence.
(In a rhyming/gay connection, Jonathan Larson's acclaimed 1996 musical "Rent" performed a similar kind of hypocritical vandalism on the experiences of non-white/non-wealthy AIDS sufferers.)
This blindfolded movie adaptation dives straight into Sherman's limited text with all guns blazing. A sentimental mock-Jewish string score, bony lead actors and heartless SS guards fill up a very stock picture of martyrs at the mercy of a cruel world. The very unimaginative Bent even comes complete with an eye-catchingly lavish decadent Nazi-nascent Berlin prologue that features Mick Jagger performing in glamour drag while decending from the roof on a crescent moon swing.
After this well-shot opening sequence, Bent descends non-stop into stage-adaption hell, with awkward theatre dialogue and spare, one-room sets providing nothing but complete viewer distantion. Almost the entire final hour of the film consists of Max (Clive Owen) and Horst (Lothaire Bluteau) lugging rocks from one side of a grey-white sand box to another and back again, while they break every now and then and have a surreptitious erotic conversation. This kind of austere Brechtian modernism can work on stage, but in a film, it is too static. Lars von Trier tried a similar thing with Dogsville and succeeded only in creating the atmosphere of a filmed play. If you want theatre, you'll go to the theatre. Imagine if you did go to the theatre and they played a movie instead!
The emotional range of the material is surprisingly limited and not at all the "devastating" Holocaust whammy many people automatically - and erroneously - assume comes with any bleak piece about the Nazi camps. The impenetrably dark realities of the Holocaust can be read about in a children's encyclopaedia yet the subject eludes most attempts to shoehorn it into a single story, leaving film makers and playwrights looking over-earnest and underprepared.
Owen goes through the right moves but always seems a bit far away, as though he's hoping his agent was right when he advised him that this role would be good for his career in the long run. The apparent love between the two men doesn't really ring true, and as the brilliant Ken Fox - the film reviewer from TV Guide - pointed out their unconvincing spoken-word love scene comes across more "like a thumping round of phone sex" than anything else. Ian McKellen's cameo last a nanosecond, and despite his obvious charisma as a singer, once Jagger loses the drag and has a dialogue only scene, he's clearly a lousy dramatic actor.
Leave it to some in the gay press to laud the film as a heartbreaking masterpiece. Popcorn Q's Brandon Judell hyperventilates that Bent "is a brave, brilliantly effective movie" with echoes of Beckett that gives "so much in return". In fact it's a pretty average film based on a very average play that has glaring consistency slippages left, right and centre in its acting, storyline and politics.
