Bent

Rating:
Summary: Hmmmm....
Review: I'm not quite sure what to make of this film. The subject is interesting, historical, true and tragic so films like this certainly need to be made but I'm reluctant to say that this is good. Having said that I did "enjoy" it, if that is the right word, and I do have it on video.

Max is an open homosexual living in Berlin in the 1930s; not the wisest of options considering that Hitler is around and has started his persecution of homosexuals (we must not forget that it was not just the Jews who were victims of his evil but homosexuals, gypsies, political opponents and Slaves as well). Max lives with dancer Rudy with whom he is in love but doesn't realise it until he is forced by the SS to murder him brutally on a train on the way to a concentration camp. On the Night of the Long Knives, Max makes the fatal error of bedding a German soldier who is wanted by the Gestapo. They break into his and Rudy's apartment, kill the soldier and force Max and Rudy to go on the run and live like dogs in the forest in constant fear of their lives. When they are eventually betrayed and caught Max finds himself left to face the brutal horrors of a concentration camp without Rudy. But he is given life-saving words of wisdom by fellow homosexual prisoner Horst, a nurse, who is better acquainted with the vicious ways of the Nazis and becomes determined to survive. Having bonded they end up working together and eventually grow to love eachother. What is more extraordinary is that they learn how to make love without actually touching.

There are some very good and poignant bits in this film and Lothaire Bluteau and Sir Ian MacKellan are very good but somehow Clive Owen doesn't seem to fit completely and his performance is very patchy.

With regards to the style of the film it is evident that it is a film adaptation of a play and so some bits, like in the beginning with all the dancers, don't translate to the big screen all that well and some of the symbolism is so desperate to be noticed that it feels patronising to watch.

As a play it would be very good indeed but as a film it falls a bit flat on it's face.

Rating:
Summary: A Bent every day, until the end of our days.
Review: In a decadent, Nazi Germany of the 30's an almost total urban and social ruins portrayed this film in the beginning. They must live almost as rats, and in a bohemian atmosphere, a theatre without roof and its walls dilapidated, the music and dancers with a drag queen hanging in a trapeze rim, the scene is mostly dantesque. The central character (Clive Owen) is excellent. He makes this film takes a portrayal of the naked human nature in its almost dehumanized levels to get an introspective revelation of its need of love and liberty. Even today, there is Bent every day, until the end of our days.

Rating:
Summary: Theatre on screen
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Let "Bent" Fall Through the Cracks Again
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: FYI - Don't buy this movie for Jude Law
Review: Notwithstanding that this was a pretty good movie, and at the risk of looking like an idiot for buying a movie just because it was listed in Jude Law's filmography, I wanted to caution anyone else who may be looking for the earlier Jude pix... So definitely rent before you buy with this one.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful
Review: Powerful film about the plight of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. Depicts the psychological torture used by the Nazis and how prisoners strove to preserve their identity even unto death. An emotionally moving ending.

Rating:
Summary: Quality performances make a quality Movie experience
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Evocative of a stage play, important material
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Exceptional
Review: The rock pile scene is well worth the time spent watching the film. Move it here, move it there. I loved it.

Rating:
Summary: A love story
Review: The simple fact that this movie garnered the previous review dated May 11th is a testament to how powerful this film is. It is a love story backdropped by the worst events in the 20th century. It will move you one way or another.