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Bent Movie Review

Bent is a 1997 British drama film directed by Sean Mathias and starring Clive Owen and Lothaire Bluteau. It’s a very moving, but messy picture.

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“I love you… What’s wrong with that?“

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In 1930s Berlin, a gay Jew is sent to a concentration camp under the Nazi regime. When I first watched this movie over a decade ago, I absolutely loved it. Watching it for the second time as a more mature viewer, I was left underwhelmed I have to say. First off, this feature was based on a stage play and it most definitely shows. The production design is very cheap as the majority of scenes play in a very confined space and the scope is also quite limited. Director Sean Mathias did not elevate this story to a cinematic status at all as he failed to make a more epic and kinetic treatment of it.

The film has a tremendous and intriguing cast of performers. Not much has been said about Lothaire Bluteau, but I found his performance to be the best of the bunch. Horst is the most tragic and most sympathetic character here and I found him to be immensely likable and quite interesting. Max as the protagonist is complex, believable and wonderfully played by Clive Owen in what is one of his better performances.

The highlight of the story came when the two simulated sex in the concentration camp without even touching one another and only using words and their imagination. This sequence emphasized the importance of the brain as our most crucial sex organ. That scene was so electric and the accompanying romantic version of it was so sweet that the rest of the movie could never reach those same heights unfortunately.

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Other characters in Bent come and go and aren’t too important to the overall story. This is a very emotional story and one that needed to have been told as for the most part we only watch the suffering of Jews when it comes to WWII films. Yes, the magnitude of their suffering was the greatest, but others were persecuted as well, so it was valuable that this film offered an insight into the horrible persecution of homosexual men themselves in Nazi Germany.

I just wished that the movie was earned in its emotional engagement instead of being manipulative, simplistic and heavy-handed. Every single scene here was predictable from the onset and most lines of dialogue and plot developments were treated in a highly unsubtle manner. Even worse is the fact that the movie is immensely unrealistic in certain scenarios, especially in the scene where the protagonist was first caught as well as how the Nazis talked and made fun of the prisoners. It all felt a bit too melodramatic and theatrical for my sake.

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