Wednesday, December 3, 1997
FILM:
Director focuses on an often neglected aspect of HolocaustBy William Li
Daily Bruin Contributor
Slouched in a filthy, decrepit train car on its way to the Dachau concentration camp, Max puts his head in his trembling hands and chants: "This isn't happening. This isn't happening. This isn't happening." Nazi officers are torturing his homosexual lover in the next room and in spite of his screams of agony, Max remains in a state of denial.
Estimates of the number of homosexual people who died during the Third Reich vary from just a few thousand to over 100,000.
Based on the award-winning play by Martin Sherman, "Bent" brings this reality to the screen. Blending history with a compelling love story between two men, the film reveals a side of the Holocaust that usually receives less attention than the Jewish extermination.
"I first read the play back in 1978," director Sean Mathias recalls. "I thought that the play was very groundbreaking in that it threw light on a piece of history even I knew very, very little about and many other people didn't know much about the persecution of gay people in Nazi Germany."
Also written by Sherman, the film starts in a Berlin nightclub full of revelry and orgiastic sex. Debonair playboy Max (Clive Owen) picks up a German soldier in spite of his love for Rudy (Brian Webber), a cabaret dancer. Everyone is oblivious to the outside world and the Gestapo raid on the nightclub comes as a surprise.
With Hitler's enforcement of Paragraph 175, an 1871 German law prohibiting homosexuality, the homosexual community of Berlin undergoes a drastic change. People are forced to renounce their sexuality, including Mick Jagger in his cameo as Greta, the drag queen owner of the club.
"I wanted to cast somebody with a very particular charisma in that role (of Greta). I wanted to have somebody who would bring with him a kind of iconography of their own so that the audience would feel comfortable that this character, Greta, resided over the whole Berlin night scene," Mathias says. "So I thought a rock star would be a sort of very obvious type to portray that."
As Greta trades in his dresses for a business suit, Max and Rudy flee from the Nazi secret police. Before leaving the country, however, they are caught and placed on a train headed to Dachau. As Nazi officers beat and eventually murder Rudy, Horst (Lothaire Bluteau), another homosexual man on the train, teaches Max to harden his heart in order to survive.
Survival at all costs unfortunately entails denying one's own identity. Horst wears a pink triangle because he's gay. But to make life easier, Max pretends to be Jewish, wearing a yellow Star of David.
Homosexuals occupied the lowest rung in the concentration camp social hierarchy and often received the worst tasks. These patches reinforce the film's historical truths that period pieces often require.
Under the watchful eyes of the guards, Max and Horst develop a love that is able to transcend their physical limitations as they spend their days moving rocks in the quarry. This scene of psychological tampering presented a formidable challenge to Mathias.
"The most difficult thing was to try to fabricate the concentration camp and try to make both the literal sense of the men moving rocks and the metaphor that that stood for work in cinematic terms," Mathias says. "It's a very claustrophobic and sort of extremely interior landscape that that's exploring. That took a certain amount of daring to try and bring that to the screen."
To complement his use of sets, lighting and weather in creating mental landscapes, Mathias went to Philip Glass for the score. A prolific composer, Glass has worked on such films as Martin Scorcese's "Kundun" and the "Candyman" movies, as well as operas like "Les Enfants Terribles" and "Einstein on the Beach."
"I wanted somebody who would give me a music that would not necessarily be a conventional film genre music," Mathias says. "(Glass is) somebody whose work I admire very particularly and I felt that he could give me a music that would be very, very strong on moods. It was important to me to create a mood that would match the visual strength of the picture."
But for Mathias, educating people about the existence of this tragedy at least fulfills a social responsibility.
"This is a story that (tells of) tolerance in the face of oppression and that's a thing I firmly believe in, living in the free world," Mathias says. "I have a duty to uphold and the best way to uphold that is to make sure that one fights oppression on whatever level one can now. By telling a story of such drama, and such a beautiful love story, I think that you sort of perpetrate that fight for liberation. We all have the right to not live in an oppressive society and we know that there are many oppressive regimes still existing in the world."
FILM: "Bent" is now playing at Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas on Pico.