Bent.

The week before Bent began to circulate in media screening rooms, a dissonant chorus of Orthodox rabbis raised their voices in protest of a Holocaust museum about to open in New York City. Their beef: The museum demeaned the suffering of Jews by acknowledging the Nazis' persecution of homosexuals [see story on page 45].

You can bet the rabbis would never make it past the first ten minutes of Bent, a bacchanalia of wartime decadence that makes Luchino Visconti's The Damned look like a dreidel competition. Director Sean Matthias and production designer Stephen Brimson Lewis have evocatively reimagined an abandoned Glasgow power plant as a corroded club paradise for Berlin's hedonists, where fire bursts and sparklers offer orgasmic exclamation as bald male dancers writhe in black evening gowns, couples of all configurations hump in alcoves, and Mick Jagger descends from a swing in full drag to croon about pretty men.

This Sodomesque spectacle was potent enough to raise the hackles of Hollywood's self-anointed holy men, the Motion Picture Association of America, but one can't help believe that the real reason Bent received its restrictive NC-17 rating 17 is in its positing a sex act between two men -- albeit one in which they never touch -- as a triumph of the human spirit.

That bit of celluloid blasphemy occurs in the second half of Matthias's high-voltage, visually haunting filmization of Martin Sherman's 1979 play. Sherman's screenplay preserves this scene, in which two gay inmates at Dachau, under close scrutiny by their Nazi guards, stand adjacent during a hard-labor break and talk each other to sexual climax. If this scene seems a tad less effective on-screen than it was on stage, it may be because the film's bruisingly graphic gaze redoubles the emotional force of everything that precedes and follows.

Sherman's self-serving protagonist is a gay lothario named Max (Clive Owen), who embodies the horrific distillation of the survival instinct. On the run from the gestapo with his boyfriend (South African newcomer Brian Webber), he is devastated to discover the depraved lengths to which he will go to save his own skin. In Max's wheeler-dealer ethos everything can be bartered -- even if it means making a Faustian pact with the enemy. .

The harrowing first half of Bent is Max's fall; the second, his redemption at Dachau, where he pays off a functionary to sport the Jew's yellow star rather than the lowlier pink triangle of the homosexual.

Spurring his salvation is a gay inmate named Horst, a would-be nurse who stirs Max's dormant heart after Max finagles Horst a mindless job lifting rocks to keep him company. The diminutive Lothaire Bluteau brings an elfin poignancy to the role. Amid Bent's barrage of Unfathomable physical and psychological abuse, Bluteau achieves the film's most shattering moment when he berates Max for poisoning their verbal lovemaking with the violence of the oppressor.

Sherman has eliminated the slick jokiness that seduced Broadway audiences in the earliest scenes of his play but has thankfully kept much of the unexpected humor that lends a grace note of absurdity to the camp sections. (As the prisoners march at gun-point, the camera picks up children frolicking and a couple picnicking, pointedly rejecting any notions that the good citizens didn't know.) Philip Glass's undulating score keeps any creeping sentimentality m check. And an art-direction nomination should be reserved for Lewis, whose gauzy tableaux of rubble and fog provide an ashen continuum between the camps and the world beyond. The film also features a cameo by Sir Ian McKellen, who played Max in the original London production.

Bent shrewdly underscores the ways in which the camps reflected the hierarchy of prejudice that exists to this day. This may be why some rabbis are crying foul over the museum: Moral imperatives aside, nothing irks some people more than having their victimhood co-opted. Bent will do little to change their minds. It should do much to add to their public shame.