Melodramatic and Moody 'Bent' Translates Poorly to Film

It's extremely difficult to know how to criticize a movie that deals with the Holocaust. A filmmaker deserves credit for even trying to film such a subject: the sheer scale and enormity of World War II seems to defy attempts at artistic representation. How can we represent the unspeakable?

It's with that caveat in mind that a viewer will have to approach Bent, a reworking of the 1979 Martin Sherman play which treats the persecution and internment of gay men in Nazi Germany. Handsome and likable but startlingly self-centered, playboy Max (Clive Owen) regularly hurts the feelings of his young lover Rudy (Brian Webber) by sleeping around with other men. But one night Max picks up the wrong soldier at a club, and the next morning the Gestapo appears at their door. On the run from the S.S. for two years, Max and Rudy are finally captured, and are hustled onto a prison train to the concentration camp at Dachau. After Rudy's brutal death at the hands of their Nazi guards, a traumatized Max manages to get himself classified as a Jew instead of a homosexual in Dachau, where he strikes up a new friendship with Horst (Lothaire Bluteau), another prisoner interned for his homosexuality.

Despite their violent and dehumanizing environment, Max and Horst's relationship deepens into love, and finally--in a tragic conclusion which recapitulates the movie's insistence on displaying powerful images of the horrors of the Holocaust--Max is forced to examine his convictions and his own identity. The film's evident main theme: the ability of the human spirit to escape even the most hopeless of prisons, so long as the individual understands and takes pride in itself.

All this sounds as if it could be the stuff of which melodrama is made--or as if it could be a heart-wrenching and uplifting success. As it happens, it's neither. Bent lies somewhere in between, neither a failure nor the transcendent triumph it aspires to be. The film suffers from a number of structural problems which distract from its central themes. It's too slowly paced, weighted down by scenes consisting either entirely of dialogue, or of silent, slow and repetitive motion--there's little action and much less spectacle. And, since most of the movie's lines are delivered either in a hyper-dramatic fashion or in the suppressed, hissing stage whisper forced on the characters in the Nazi camp, it's difficult for the actors to convey much variety in the dramatic register of the dialogue.

Many of these traits, of course, could be viewed as a direct result of the movie's origin as a stage play. But what works on stage doesn't always work on film, and Bent's stagey conventions make it drag along.

One could also contend that the film's drawn-out weightiness, its sense of bleakness and numbing repetition, is a deliberate goal. After all, this is a film about the horrors of war and of persecution, and forcing the viewers to share in the deliberately dehumanizing environment forced upon the camps' victims could be--in theory--a powerful aesthetic effect.

The problem is that it's difficult to maintain emotional identification with the main characters while we're having our minds and emotions numbed. For instance, the scenes of Max and Horst at work in the concentration camp--endless vistas of two ragged, small figures stumbling across the whiteness of stone or snow in their meaningless work--evoke echoes of the theatre of the absurd, of postmodern anguish a la Waiting for Godot. But it seems unclear why this effect is courted in the first place. The movie's ultimate aim appears to be a statement about the sublime aptitudes and beauty of the human soul, and the existentialist numbness of its intermediate scenes, striking as they may be, are working against this effect.

The film's acting is generally above average; unfortunately, that's not quite enough to make things work in a film so character-oriented as Bent. Owen's Max is conventionally handsome and is good at looking worried, but he doesn't quite succeed in letting us see into his inner world. It doesn't help that the chemistry between him and his first lover, Rudy, is almost nonexistent. Webber as Rudy exaggerates the younger man's submissiveness to the point that the character becomes almost infantile--while we sympathize with his helplessness, he's petulant enough to alienate the audience as well as Max. Lothaire Bluteau as Horst, the concentration camp inmate with whom Max finds his first real love, is much the strongest of the leads. Bluteau, perhaps best known to American audiences for the title role in the French Canadian film Jesus of Montreal here reprises that role to a certain degree. As a man martyred for his beliefs and his loves, Bluteau still manages to generate enough gruffness and earthy humanity to balance the larger-than-life tragedy of his situation, making his character the most three-dimensional and heart-wrenching of the bunch.

It would be unfair to suggest that this adaptation of Bent is a total failure--its ambitiousness and intrinsically powerful subject matter aside, there are a number of marvelous moments in the film. The opening sequence, which captures the sensual decadence of a gay Berlin cabaret of the 1930s, is almost worth the admission price by itself. Titillating and visually gorgeous, it's heightened by an unexpected cameo: Mick Jagger, startlingly in his element as nightclub owner Greta (a.k.a. George), performs a throaty torch song in full drag whilst suspended on a platform from the ceiling, in a menacingly campy turn disturbingly reminiscent of Tim Curry as Frank N. Furter.

Sir Ian McKellan, who originated the role of Max 20 years ago in the stage premier of Bent that won him an Olivier, is luminous in a later cameo as Max's Uncle Freddie. Freddie is a "fluff" like Max, but he's one who has chosen to play it safe by repressing his desires. And, fortunately, several of the play's most powerfully written moments have translated well to film. Especially remarkable is a pivotal scene in Dachau in which Max and Horst, forbidden to touch and kept under the ever-vigilant eye of their guard, make love to each other by using only words--and discover that orgasm really is in the mind.

It's moments like this in which the characters of Bent almost connect with each other and with the audience, and we are able to see what the film could have become in the hands of actors better suited to their roles and to one another. Unfortunately, the bulk of the movie is weighed down both by the actors' slightly unsympathetic characterizations and by its sluggish pacing.

Bent's cumulative effect is an extremely heavy, painful and unhappy one. For those who feel that this is an appropriate effect for a film that chronicles atrocity, it will undoubtedly be a fulfilling experience. But those who prefer to be entertained as they are educated may find something lacking. In the end, for better or for worse, it's hard to imagine a more depressing way to spend two hours.