BENT (39)

Directed by: Sean Mathias

Starring: Clive Owen, Lothaire Bluteau, Ian McKellen, Mick Jagger

The Pitch: Two homosexuals forge an unlikely friendship amid the horrors of a Nazi concentration-camp.

Theo Sez: Relentlessly stylised and theatrical, which sometimes half-works (the catechism-style dialogue builds powerfully, in a stagy way) and sometimes doesn't (Jagger in drag, amid an atmosphere of divine decadence, is just camp). Yet the real problem isn't a lack of "cinema" - Angelopoulos' favourite DP brings a haunted look to the misty forest scenes and the rocky barrenness of the concentration camp, and the device of reducing Dachau's horrors to an insane kind of forced labour echoes Lumet's THE HILL - but, surprisingly (given the original play's reputation), a lack of ideas. It's apparently a metaphor of sorts for closet queers who, in denying their sexuality, also deny the persecution of gays in general - our hero, who conceals his homosexuality (preferring the - allegedly - less reviled Jewish 'yellow star' to the 'pink triangle'), is also in denial about the evil around him, convinced he can "cut a deal" with the Nazis and assuring himself that "this isn't happening" ; but the film is too partisan to examine his motives and, above all, too enamoured of its allegory to look beyond it, to give any of its characters much life beyond their various roles in its thesis. The final effect is of a very abstract film, stylised to encompass all oppression in whatever context, set in a no-man's-land and inhabited by pawns (plus the increasingly inevitable Philip Glass score) ; memorable in bits, but more a conversation-piece than a real movie.