Bent (1997)

People are voting emotionally.

Load of rubbish!!

Fresh and Exciting

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The horror at the heart of this film is portrayed unflinchingly, but without sensationalism. The story is about the Nazi's extermination of homosexuals during the Third Reich. Max is a wild-living young queer man who takes one risk too many and finds himself in Dachau concentration camp. From the moment he is captured, he resolves to survive and must find out how far he is willing to go to do so.Max's (Clive Owen) determination to survive powers the narrative, and I found it utterly compelling. The film is well directed, sliding seamlessly from impressionistic fantasy to nightmarish realism. Not all of the acting is brilliant, but Clive Owen is good, and cameos from Mick Jagger and Ian McKellen are rewarding.

This is set in Germany right around the time the Nazis started herding Jews and gays into concentration camps. A gay couple (one played by Clive Owen) try to escape but are captured. One dies but Owen lives. He also swears to do anything to survive in the camps--even keeping it secret that he's gay. Then he meets another gay prisoner Horst (Lothaire Bluteau) and falls in love. Horst tries to make him come out. Will he?A perfectly good idea for a drama (and based on a play) is totally botched. It's quite frankly deadly dull. Owen (a good actor) gives a rare bad performance. He's good every once in a while but mostly he's really off. Bluteau is great but he can't carry the whole movie. They keep going on and on and ON about coming out and being yourself till you want to scream. The same points are repeated to a ridiculous degree. It's pretty well-directed but was made on a very low budget which shows. There are some interesting people in small roles--Mick Jagger (as a drag queen), Ian McKellan, Jude Law, Rupert Graves, Charlie Watts and an unknown Paul Bettany. Still they're not enough to make this worth watching. A rightfully forgotten gay drama.

Even though it is meant to be a good movie, it really isn't because it just doesn't seem to make sense for. OK in the beginning , we know well that it's set in a gay bar during world war II and of course, the lead character Max is gay.Then he gets involved with this Nazi solider and he gets killed when he was found out by the Nazi party. Then the other characters escaped and that's when I thought this movie kinda went downhill on me, it just didn't make sense! It didn't concentrate much on the characters as it should've done and the movie really dragged on so I decided to just not watch it anymore.Mick Jagger was excellent at his role and of course, singing streets of Berlin in drag!I just wish he really made more appearances in this film, it didn't work much without him :/

Powerful, delicate, strange. Slices of stories and one character. A film about love, deep refuges and truth. An ashes lake. It is not a film about the gay life in Nazi period. It is only invitation to choose. And to make the words basic facts. That is all. The movie, and the play, is more than a picture of a form of reality. It is more than a testimony, accusation or manifesto. It is reflection of many forms of silence. About the life as an old apple. About the evening without any morning. About the night of gestures and sleep of feelings. "Bent" is great for the traces after its end. Everybody may be Max or Horst or Rudy or the sadistic Nazi. It is simple. Cruel of simple. But this mirror of personal soul is more a game, more a joke. It is not a complicated film. In fact, it is another old Greek tragedy. A tragedy without end. Must see!