Black and white and dull all over: interracial sex is taboo in Proteus, but the storytelling fails to arouse.

Proteus * Written by Jack Lewis and John Greyson * Directed by John Greyson * Starring Rouxnet Brown, Neil Sandilands * Strand Releasing

Writers and directors out to make movies based on true stories ought to keep in mind that just because it actually happened doesn't make it fascinating. That point is made painfully clear by Proteus, the fact-based movie from director John Greyson (Lilies, Zero Patience) and cowriter Jack Lewis. Sure, the raw material is potentially explosive, politically absorbing, and emotionally devastating: the forbidden 18th-century love affair between a black convict and a white convict sentenced to hard labor in a South African penal colony during an ugly antigay pogrom by Dutch settlers. Unfortunately for audiences, watching the film also feels like hard labor.

At first, the relationship between Blank (Rouxnt Brown), an unjustly imprisoned native Hottentot, and Jacobsz (Neil Sandilands), a Dutch sailor serving time for sodomy, turns on racial mistrust and unresolved psychosexual tension, sort of like The Defant Ones, the old Sidney Poitier-Tony Curtis movie about prisoners of different races bound together, only with raging hormones. Add to the mix married, closeted botanist Niven (Shaun Smyth), occupied as much with naming and cultivating South African species as with casually cruising Blank.

Sort of like Papillon meets Kiss of the, Spider Woman, the butch, surly Jacobsz and butch, opportunistic Blank are soon staring too long at each other and eventually sneaking off for quick bouts of utterly unerotic boinking. Out of jealousy over Niven's attentions to Blank, Jacobsz--who has the best and shiniest head of hair on bad boys' island--tells his black lover how he once witnessed the botanist having sex with another man under a bridge in Amsterdam, leading to a mildly titillating flashback. Given the prejudices and circumstances of the era, we know all this unbridled eroticism has to end tragically.

What we also know is that such rich material needn't have been played as flatly, unemotionally, and clumsily as a historical pageant. We never feel rely heat or passion, much less chemistry, between Brown and Sandilands as the lovers. Where their climactic farewell scene should spark anger, outrage, and grief, it merely lies there, prompting a whopping "So what?" Proteus is the cinematic equivalent of capital punishment, only much slower.

Rebello also writes for Spin, Playboy, and Hollywood Life.