Bent

Years before the actual Holocaust, Hitler re-enacted an obscure German law declaring homosexuality illegal. His Gestapo stormed Berlin, murdering and imprisoning those who "disobeyed." Bent unspools the story of Max (Clive Owen), a suave Jewish playboy who breaks this statute by tumbling into bed with a German soldier. He's captured and tossed on a train to Dachau, where he's driven to near-insanity by the Nazis' torture. But Max survives the train journey with the help of a sparrow-like boy (Lothaire Bluteau) whom he meets again in the labor camp. Although the prisoners are barely allowed to speak to one another, never mind touch, the two fall in love.

First-time director Sean Mathias, who directed the award-winning play of the same name, conjures images of jolting intensity. The opening bacchanal (featuring a lithe-limbed Mick Jagger in drag) smolders with reckless lust and brandied decadence. In contrast, the labor camp chills with near-monochromatic austerity -- often these scenes include just Owen, Bluteau, and two piles of rubble. Yet the film's painfully stagy script usurps its visual power. The men sound more formal than fervent, as if they were belting their lines to the back row. In a story that upholds passion as the key to survival but emits no palpable heat, Bent educates but doesn't awe. At the Kendall Square.

-- Alicia Potter