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.