Customer Reviews

Bent

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

WOW. What an amazing story. Yes, we've all seen stories about Nazi Germany...and most have been very well done. Similar to "The Pianist," this story follows the life of one man as he's rounded up for a concentration camp. This story provides a unique twist on the treatment of those deemed unworthy in the eyes of the Nazi regime -- not because he's Jewish, but because he's gay. If anyone's ever wondered where the pink triangle became a symbol of the gay community, you'll find it here.

I won't go into details about the story because you can read that in the description. However, I will say that this was a VERY well made movie and finally captures a new side of the Nazi terrorism -- the plight of gays. Another plus is that the movie is story-driven rather than sex-driven like many gay movies. You'll actually get to know the characters and appreciate them for who they are...not who they do. Therefore, I highly recommend this movie for gay and straight viewers.

BENT has an all-star cast that stars British actor ("Derailed" star), Clive Owen as the movie's resident hero and lost soul, Max. Music legend, Mick Jagger has a small part playing a female impersonator who disappears after the first 15 minutes. Lothaire Bluteau plays sentimental Horst, and Brian Webber is poor, innocent Rudy.

Even though the movie is ten years old I never heard of it until last week. It's still an awesome movie because it tells such a powerful story. BENT tells the tragic tale of two homosexual men in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany during the 30's. When I first heard of this movie I thought that BENT was a weird title. But I think that after watching it anyone will agree that it's a very appropriate title.

The first 30 minutes of the movie are somewhat slow-moving. It shows Berlin before Nazi Germany took over. As you know, during this time in Berlin men danced with men and women danced with women and all were free to be happy and gay. At first sight, it's almost reminiscent of the classic film, "Grand Hotel." And I soon wished that there would be some dialogue and something interesting to watch because it seemed like the beginning was really dragging on.

Max was a foolish man to bring home another man that he met the night before, Wolf (played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.) Sadly, when the Nazis break in, Wolf's demise is quick and brutal.

Max and Rudy try to get out of Germany because they are both homosexual men living in a country that wants them treated in the most inhumane ways possible. In the concentration camps homosexual men are the very, very lowest of the low. So, Max and Rudy have to sleep in the woods, or as Rudy calls it, the "jungle" while they race for a way out of Germany. As Rudy embraces Max to profess his love the Nazis come running towards them.

Both men are put on a train heading to a concentration camp. I don't want to give too much away but the train scenes are among the most vulgar and hardest to watch. I can't imagine that hell is any worse than what my gay brothers and sisters had to go through during the Holocaust. I think this movie was originally rated NC-17, and although I am very grateful that this story is being told I am also grateful that I only watched the cable TV version (which was still sad enough.)

Max has to tell the Gestapo that Rudy is not his friend (i. e. lover); for his own (temporary) safety. Clive Owen gave an especially momentous performance during the train scenes because it was obvious that he was trying to get Rudy out of his head (but could not.) Max first meets Horst on their "train trip to purgatory" and Horst tells him that he must not get close to anyone if he wants to survive in this place. Now I know why this picture is called BENT.

At the concentration camp, Max bribed one of the guards so he could work with Horst. Their mundane job is to move huge boulders back and forth, all day. The only purpose of this task is to make them emotionally and physically weak.

Even under such adverse conditions, Max and Horst fall in love. But they can never touch each other or even look at each other. They can never hold one another's hand or feel the other's breath. If one of the Nazis saw either man in even the most innocent intimate embrace or even having casual contact he would surely be dead.

So, instead both men talk to each other. They have a love affair in their minds. My favorite parts are when Max and Horst were working alone and able to talk to each other. At least in their minds they could love each other and not be afraid of the consequences.

Clive Owen's performance in this film was absolutely perfect. I am not an actor, but maybe it's easier for actors to act when they are surrounded with talent, and the rest of the cast was also flawless. Max totally reminded me of Ennis Del Mar. Both men had so much pent-up self-hate. However, Max's was much more fundamental, and twisted. It became evident that the abuse the Nazis inflected on Max's mind was just as brutal and barbaric as the physical corruption that they generously dished out. Clive Owen should've gotten an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Max. (I guess in 1997 it wasn't politically correct to give gay movies Oscars?)

Why is BENT so tragic and sad? Because it is true. The movie's realism will haunt you for days (or even weeks.) The characters are fictional, but be assured it did happen. This movie reminded of a very powerful book, "Behold A Pale Horse." This was a book based on true events which also describes a gay love story during the Holocaust.

Who do I recommend this movie to? Anyone. Not just the gay community, but to all of humanity. Anyone that has any feeling will bleed for these poor men: Wolf, Rudy, Max, Horst; and the thousands and thousands of homosexuals that were tortured and murdered for no other reason than for being born gay.

When I first started reading film criticism, while still in my teens, I remember being, at first, surprised that and then understanding of why many critics were wary of films adapted from stage plays. At first blush, film seems to be a logical extension of the stage, but then when you take into account the unique aspects of both genres, you realize that they are, in many ways, worlds apart. Despite the cinema's (ever increasing) ability to create astonishing special effects, it is the more naturalistic of the two genres. A scene that takes place in the great outdoors can be shot in the great outdoors. With the camera focusing in for close-ups, actors don't have to rely on grand gestures or declamatory oration to convey their meaning.

The standard term among movie makers and their critics for the changes that have to be made to successfully adapt a stage play to the cinema is "opening it up." You have to get it off the stage and into the world. Sometimes it works, and sometimes they fall flat. But the cinematic beast is hungry for narrative and stage plays (along with novels, short stories, lesser known foreign films, and nowadays old comic strips and TV shows) continue to provide it fodder.

Everything I knew about the play BENT did not make it seem promising for film adaptation. I was wrong. Although I've never seen the stage version, one can almost envision it from watching the film. One can also pretty much guess what changes have been made, where things have been embellished and what cinematic tricks have been thrown in to spice things us. So that makes it pretty transparent, right? And therefore not such a great film.

Well, yes and no. The film doesn't achieve actual greatness, I suppose. But even though it's a bit stagey, perhaps, in some ways, it compensates brilliantly for it in other ways. First off, the cinematography is brilliant and no doubt brings a quite different perspective to the drama. The acting is also top notch. I had never seen Clive Owen in anything before--although judging from the reviews posted here, he has quite a fan base. Deservedly so, I'd say based on his performance he turns in here. His character, Max, makes the transition from callow sensualist to self-sacrificing hero believably--and in relatively few scenes. Equally good is French-Canadian actor, Lothaire Bluteau, as Horst, Max's soul-mate and (platonic?) lover. The scene in which they "make love" without touching is quietly powerful--and emblematic of the differences between the cinema and the stage discussed above. Here the actors work with close-ups and with their voices, they cannot gesture because they're being watched. Whatever the stage actors did in the equivalent scene had to be different--even if it was just as effective. They were denied the close-ups that these two actors take great advantage of.

The true test of a film's power is whether or not you'll be thinking about it the next day, or the next week. BENT passes that test hands down. It stays with you--and likely will for a long time.

(PS--Just to follow up on a review posted below. One reviewer didn't understand the relevance of the scene in the park with Ian McKellan. I can understand the confusion, as the sound seemed unnecessarily muffled at this point in the film. It is a bit sketchy, but it's fairly clear McKellan's character is Max's uncle, who while also gay, is closeted and, unlike Max himself, not estranged from their (apparently wealthy) family. He offers Max forged papers, which the family has been able to obtain for him to facilitate his escape from Germany. Max is,however, adamant that they also obtain papers for his lover as well, an early signal that he is not just the callow and selfish hedonist he seemed to be in the film's opening scenes--which makes his ultimate transformation by the film's end all the more plausible.)

This film is definitely not for the faint-hearted, nor those who choose to see human beings as "good or bad" and situations as "black or white." The main character, Max, is a bit of a rotter at the start of the piece, played with an unapologetic grin by Clive Owen (the grin gradually fades and fractures). The film opens by cross-cutting between the morning after one hell of a night before, during which Max hung out with his wild friends in an orgiastic melee that included dancers of both (and some questionable) sexes, Mick Jagger as Greta, a singer who hangs over the group in a circular sit-down trapeze as she sings, cocaine-snorting storm troopers (costumed and genuine), and Max now waking to find a strange, lovely boy in his bed (the excellent Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of "Black Hawk Down" and "Wimbledon"), and his enraged live-in lover screaming at him. In the confusion of "what the hell happened last night--I don't remember", they are interrupted by Storm Troopers who slit the throat of this lovely one-night stand while Max and his lover run for their lives to Greta, who dresses them as respectable men, burns her wardrobes, and sends them on to get to safety as best they can. As this night obviously represents Max's usual M.O., his shallow self-interest is believable enough that much later, in Dachau, we watch him gentled by the first love of his life, Horst (played with quiet self-confidence by Lothaire Bluteau) with as much surprise and joy as Max himself seems to experience.

After Max's headlong flight to his gay but closeted Uncle, played by Ian McKellen in a small but pivotal role, ends in failure to get papers for his lover as well as himself, the two hide out in the Black Forest of Germany, then end up captured on a train ride to hell, during which the boy is beaten to death and thrown off the train, and Max's psyche disintegrates into chaos as he tries to deny the reality of his new life and its morally repugnant choices--when it comes down to his life or his lover's, he chooses his own, following the Nazi guard's unspeakable order (the guard is played with cool, scary detachment by the impeccable Rupert Graves), and then follows this by another act (that must be left to the viewer to hear about to believe). By this time, his self-loathing has reached a level that is so unbearable, he makes yet another choice to try to survive that will somehow, in his own mind, make acceptable what he's just done.

He chooses to debark the train in disguise as a Jew, rather than as the doubly ostracized, pink triangle-d homosexual. Max's deceit is quickly understood to be desperate but bone-deep, not merely a ploy. Max cannot be honest with himself about any aspect of his own character--despite the fact that he's constantly calling himself "a terrible person," his arrogant narcissism is obvious, as is his constant belief in his ability to "make deals" which will guarantee his survival. Only as his relationship with Horst develops does he begin to show signs of character. Earlier in the film, he has taken his young dancer partner under his wing and though resentful, has not abandoned him, a glimpse of what Max can become, but he hasn't behaved with much honor so far. This renouncement of his identity as a "fluffer" (his uncle's word) is his final selfish act. After this, Horst's influence begins to take hold and love enters his life, probably for the first time. As the two of them move rocks from one pile to another, only to move the same pile back to its original spot over and over again, their separation from the rest of the inmates of Dachau allows them to develop the sort of intimacy that Max has never even tried to seek in the midst of his previously hedonistic Berlin life. (I like, too, that their story stays isolated and doesn't get lost in expensive set-dressing that tries to re-create all of Dachau. The location appears to be an industrial site, and this separation keeps the focus appropriately narrow.)

I like Mick Jagger as the cross-dressing chanteuse of the group's nighttime rubble "Nightclub" and love that serious actors like Jude Law and Rachel Weisz show up for momentary bits that you'll miss if you blink, and that Ian McKellen took this small role as Max's uncle. Later, the always-great Paul Bettany shows up as another casually sadistic Nazi guard and brings about the film's denoument. This comradarie reminded me of "And the Band Played On..." where everyone pitched in to get the project made and to give it weight through their presence. It's an important story, and one which reminds us that the chant really shouldn't be "6 million dead," but rather and with all respect, "10 million dead," which is the estimated count when one adds the additional 4 million gay men and women, Catholics, political dissidents, Poles, Germans who wouldn't go along with the Reich or who were merely "intellectuals", French Resistance fighters (those who weren't shot), actual criminals (though who knows what that word meant during the Reich?) and miscellaneous "undesirables" who were not Jewish, but who suffered and died, too. And it's a good history lesson to see how homosexuals claimed the infamous upside-down pink triangle, turned it point up, and began to wear it with pride rather than shame--a wonderful example of the reclamation of self. In point of fact, Hitler's swastika was an ancient, universal "walking star" or "walking circle", a symbol that existed in Neolithic Europe as well as amongst Native Americans, as a symbol of transformation and growth. We Indians here have tried to reclaim it, as it was a powerful healing symbol, but it's hard to wear a bracelet with that sign on it, no matter what its history. But this is the reason Hitler chose it--it had a legacy of powerful change, and he stole it, as he stole other symbols of mystical power.

The love-making scene between Max and Horst is beautifully acted, especially by Bluteau, and its subtlety was a masterstroke of writing--it is more emotionally deep than any "sex" scene could have been. It is a profound statement of the power of love and the assertion that love-making occurs in the mind as much as in the body. It feels, too, that this may have been the first time Max actually made love, rather than had sex, and it is moving and beautiful. By now Max has begun to change, and his capacity for unselfish love blossoms, ironically in the worst place on Earth--quite a wonderful bit of writing.

The one problem with the film is the score. Phillip Glass' shallow, repetitive, irritatingly New Age-y music is, if you can imagine, more annoying than the idea of moving rocks back and forth. Only the final solo is beautiful and up to the standard of the rest of the film. His music is like Michael Nyman's--it either works beautifully or is a disaster, and I found it disastrous in this case. The musical cues are also abrupt and distracting, and in such a moody film, the last thing one wants is to be jarred out of a reverie.

The heart-breaking but defining, self-affirming ending is often called a "downer" but I found it to be the opposite. To finally take his identity and his destiny into his own hands was Max's only way to truly "survive" both his loss and the camp--as Horst says earlier, such an act drives the Nazis crazy because it is self-willed, and their deepest goal was to destroy the will, not merely the life, of each camp inmate. Max's act is an escape beyond capture, and ultimately, his truest human act.

Many reviewers have made insightful comments about the new-to-DVD "Bent" in this space. I first saw the film version of what was originally a play in 1998, shortly after its release. Now it is released again and I've given it a second look. It remains as powerful, and underrated, as ever. Though you sometimes can't escape the fact that it began its life on the stage, "Bent" is a success as cinema, with superb cinematography and powerfully understated performances by the entire cast--including the splendid Mick Jagger, as Greta, who embodies the rudderless, urban, hyperstylized post WWI-era Berlin so vividly depicted in Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Diaries 1929 - 1939. Jagger's pitch perfect,mannered performance of "Streets Of Berlin" is quite haunting, and his "mask" of a woman, intentionally transparent, gone in place of expediency when he perfoms a careless (rather than malevolent) act of duplicity that would surely be avenged brutally. R.W. Fassbinder, had he lived to direct this work, may have made it as deliberately 'theatrical' as his adaptation of Genet's "Querelle," but I doubt it: I wish he lived long enough to give us his version. But "Bent" is a film for those who love cinema and are willing to see a powerful film about love and redemption: don't believe it is a "gay" movie or a "holocaust" film - see it and be moved.

The movie has been set to feel a bit more like a stage play than a film, but it works nonetheless. It covers the story of two gay men who meet in a Nazi death camp and a very inspiring if ultimately tragic love story. Gays and lesbians are the often-forgotten victims of the Holocaust, and this movie and the play it is based on are important, also, because of its contribution to Holocaust studies in general. Mick Jager's unusual appearance as a drag queen is also interesting. As a source of education, there is some sexual content that makes the film inappropriate for use in high school classrooms without a bit of editing, but I think unedited material is very well suited to a college classroom--and is essential viewing for anyone interested in the Holocaust. An important piece of GLBT heritage.

In today's world of multi-million-dollar-budget films it's easy to develop high expectations. We're accustomed now to realities whose sights and sounds have been tweaked by talent and technology to perfection--we see exactly what the director hoped we would, rather than settling for less-impressive, but more-thoughtful, innuendos and visual metaphors.

So in some ways it's refreshing to partake of a lower-budget production like Bent. The world of staged theatre is a simpler, more intellectual one than that of cinema, and too often an exquisitely crafted stage play is "technologized" beyond recognition when it is shot for the screen. But, no doubt because playwright Martin Sherman himself adapted the screenplay, Bent still feels as nakedly thoughtful as the best small-cast stage dramas.

The story centers on the relationship between Max, a gay jew in Hitler's Germany, and Horst, whose character is introduced in such a way that we're half-surprised to realize later in the film that he's the same person we met on the train. But that is the beauty of the playwright's craft: in art, as in life, people we meet as "passing strangers" can come to touch us profoundly.

The sets Mathias chooses as backdrops for the story are far from accurate historically, but they are perfectly chosen to support the mood of the film--Max and Horst, like the star-crossed lovers in a Shakespeare tragedy, are lonely pawns to forces much larger than they. Indeed, Bent offers the most tragically romantic scenes of any film I've seen. Two lovers, brought together by the same forces that keep them forever apart, survive on fantasy and suggestion in a world where life, in so many ways, has no meaning.

Bent is not a "feel-good" movie. But again, the art of Bent allows us to find a strange sort of peace in the lives and loves of two strangers who met on a train.

Some people might say the morals set in this movie are a bit strange but that is coming from the people who just have to have a nonstop action setting. People have said this movie is a bit stagey, i agree but being a young actor myself it is quite rare that you view this kind of work. I liked the way that it was. This movie is great. The performances are outstanding expecially from Clive Owen, who i enjoyed in King Arthur. The man has exceptional ability to keep the audience with him the entire film to the shocking and breath taking ending. Ian Mckellan who was also in the stage version of this film makes this movie even more better.

Clive Owen and Lothaire Bluteau bring talent and personality to these two victims of the holocaust. In stark contrast, the beginning of the film shows "gay" Berlin (with a ghastly performance by Mick Jagger) in it's glory. Owen's character is full of lusts and life, oblivious to the woes that are so near his door. Until his fling with a soldier brings his and his lovers capture. Once the Nazis have him, Owen doesn't want the stigma of being a homosexual at the concentration camp so he admits to being a Jew. His friendship with Bluteau emerges while in the camp, soon growing to love, but nothing can change their tragic fate. A great film about the forgotten victims of the holocaust - the homosexuals.

This movie has to be one of the best I have ever seen! Usually you'll see Holocaust persecution of the Jews, but you get to see a rare glimpse of the homosexual hatred inflicted by the Nazis in this film. We are introduced to Max, a handsome man who is enjoying the colorful nightlife of Berlin when a sexual encounter with a soldier puts his life in danger. Caught by the Nazis, he meets Horst on a train heading for one of the concentration camps, a fellow homosexual who shows him how to survive and later how to love. If you're looking for fast paced action and dazzling special effects, go rent some cheesy action flick. Yet if you want to see heart-wrenching drama then this is your movie to see. Mick Jagger also entertains with a colorful performance of "Streets of Berlin."