Word: horst
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...hustled onto a prison train to the concentration camp at Dachau. After Rudy's brutal death at the hands of their Nazi guards, a traumatized Max manages to get himself classified as a Jew instead of a homosexual in Dachau, where he strikes up a new friendship with Horst (Lothaire Bluteau), another prisoner interned for his homosexuality...
Despite their violent and dehumanizing environment, Max and Horst's relationship deepens into love, and finally--in a tragic conclusion which recapitulates the movie's insistence on displaying powerful images of the horrors of the Holocaust--Max is forced to examine his convictions and his own identity. The film's evident main theme: the ability of the human spirit to escape even the most hopeless of prisons, so long as the individual understands and takes pride in itself...
...problem is that it's difficult to maintain emotional identification with the main characters while we're having our minds and emotions numbed. For instance, the scenes of Max and Horst at work in the concentration camp--endless vistas of two ragged, small figures stumbling across the whiteness of stone or snow in their meaningless work--evoke echoes of the theatre of the absurd, of postmodern anguish a la Waiting for Godot. But it seems unclear why this effect is courted in the first place. The movie's ultimate aim appears to be a statement about the sublime aptitudes...
...between him and his first lover, Rudy, is almost nonexistent. Webber as Rudy exaggerates the younger man's submissiveness to the point that the character becomes almost infantile--while we sympathize with his helplessness, he's petulant enough to alienate the audience as well as Max. Lothaire Bluteau as Horst, the concentration camp inmate with whom Max finds his first real love, is much the strongest of the leads. Bluteau, perhaps best known to American audiences for the title role in the French Canadian film Jesus of Montreal here reprises that role to a certain degree. As a man martyred...
...Freddie is a "fluff" like Max, but he's one who has chosen to play it safe by repressing his desires. And, fortunately, several of the play's most powerfully written moments have translated well to film. Especially remarkable is a pivotal scene in Dachau in which Max and Horst, forbidden to touch and kept under the ever-vigilant eye of their guard, make love to each other by using only words--and discover that orgasm really is in the mind...