Old Yorker

  • 120 BPM (Beats per Minute)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    120 battements par minute

    Robin Campillo (2017)

    Set in Paris in the early 1990s, 120 BPM describes the activities of the city’s ACT UP chapter, the interactions of its members and the romantic relationship of two of them in particular.   ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), founded in New York in 1987, grew into an international advocacy movement.  Its aim was (and continues to be) to influence legislation, government policy, and medical research and treatment, all with a view to increasing the life expectancy of AIDS sufferers and improving the lot of HIV-positive people generally.   In the first main sequence of Robin Campillo’s film, four young people – three male, one female – are welcomed to their first ACT UP meeting by an experienced member.  He explains house rules to the newcomers – such as finger-clicking rather than hand-clapping to indicate support for a speaker’s argument, thereby minimising interruption and saving time.  This briefing is also an economical and effective way of educating the film’s audience in the conduct of ACT UP meetings, of which there will be plenty to follow.

    For a while, 120 BPM seems no more than reconstruction of a high order.  So too, in its early stages, did Laurent Cantet’s The Class (2008) – Robin Campillo edited and, with François Bégaudeau and Cantet, worked on the screenplay for that fine film.  As with The Class, the reconstruction in 120 BPM is so dynamic and its content so inherently interesting that the material doesn’t feel dramatically insufficient.  In presenting the group’s debates and arguments over tactics, and staging their various public appearances and sit-ins, Campillo is creating a valuable record of an historically significant movement in a specific time and place.  But you’re always conscious that a straightforward documentary could do that too; you feel the director is bound to move into more conventional dramatic territory by focusing on a few individuals.  This is exactly what he does, though without losing sight of the larger ACT UP context.  The achievement of 120 BPM is how very well this trajectory works.

    There’s an obvious logic to the structure:  the lives of the group members are tending towards personal tragedy – their own illness and death or the agonies of people well known and often dear to them.  The fast pace of 120 BPM (the heart rate of the title is tachycardic) is a reminder that the clock is ticking and T-cells are reducing rapidly.  Behind the voluble energy of the ACT UP meetings, there’s not just an urgent pressure for action.  Robin Campillo also suggests that keeping talking and busy is a crucial means of keeping dismay and terror at bay.  It’s apt that the central players turn out to be the radical, impulsive motor-mouth Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a controversial star turn at ACT UP meetings and what follows from them, and the quieter, more watchful Nathan (Arnaud Valois), one of the new members of the group briefed in the opening scene.  Sean and Nathan contrast too in that the former is HIV-positive, the latter not so.

    By no means all the ACT UP contingent are themselves AIDS sufferers.   They include a middle-aged woman called Hélène (Catherine Vinatier), who got involved because her teenage son Marco (Théophile Ray), also a member of the group, is HIV-positive.  In some cases, we never find out whether or not a character is ‘poz’ (as the English subtitling has it) or what their motivation for participating in ACT UP might otherwise be.  Sophie (Adèle Haenel), for example, could be HIV-positive; or a gay rights campaigner; or a less specifically motivated public health crusader.  The fact that Campillo and Philippe Mangeot, with whom he wrote the screenplay, don’t pigeon-hole everyone makes 120 BPM feel more real and textured.  It’s a major strength of the film that it avoids simple alignment of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ attitudes towards ACT strategies and priorities.  Both the people and the politics are more complicated than that.

    The group’s actions are diverse.  They interrupt a speech by the head of a government public health agency (François Rabette) and drench him in fake blood.  (Marco’s main role in ACT UP is preparing the recipe for these red missiles in the family bathtub.)   They stage a sit-in at the headquarters of the pharmaceutical company producing a protease inhibitor that remains largely unavailable to HIV patients.  Their outreach work takes them into schools to educate teenage students about safe sex etc.  When a homophobic schoolgirl scorns the offer of an AIDS awareness leaflet – she rejects it as for ‘fags’ only – Sean’s instinctive reaction is to annoy the girl by kissing Nathan on the lips.   Up to this point, a liaison between Nathan and Thibault (Antoine Reinartz), an influential member of ACT UP and Sean’s bête noire, has looked to be on the cards.  From the point of the pivotal schoolyard kiss onwards, Robin Campillo develops the Sean-Nathan relationship – convincingly and imaginatively.

    Interleaved between the ACT UP meetings and activities are occasional dance sequences in clubs, which have a trance-like quality (for as much as I could bear to watch them:  the flashing lights were a challenge).  It’s following one such sequence that Sean and Nathan first sleep together.  In bed, each tells the other about a previous sexual partner – the secondary school teacher who infected Sean when he was only sixteen, a partner who concealed that he was HIV-positive from Nathan.  Campillo works into Sean and Nathan’s lovemaking visualisations of these earlier encounters.   The chiaroscuro lighting (by Jeanne Lapoirie) and the cutting (by Campillo, Anita Roth and Stephanie Leger) impart a combination of both transience and intensity to this extended episode, which seems to radiate through the rest of the film – and is actually the only sexual activity in evidence in 120 BPM, except for two much later and shorter sequences.  In the first of these – a sad but somehow funny scene – Nathan visits the dying Sean in hospital and masturbates him.  The couple’s conversational exchanges are effective too.  Campillo makes clever use of the short break that routinely takes place during ACT UP meetings to have Sean ask Nathan how he’s kept clear of HIV and Nathan, in response, to talk about his years of celibacy and guiltily unresolved feelings about breaking off contact with his first love.

    Although it contains, as well sparing amounts of sex, plenty of well-written dialogue, this is a primarily corporeal film.  The varied presentation of bodies is central to its power:  bodies moving rhapsodically to electro-pop tracks in the club sequences; bodies imposing themselves in demos and protests; bodies, scarred by Kaposi’s sarcoma, that are wasting away.   Robin Campillo makes you aware of the shocking youth of the people he shows facing and fearing death – the vector of sadness is reinforced by their vitality and the cinematic vitality of 120 BPM yet the narrative is emotionally nuanced.  In a brief but particularly poignant section, Nathan and Sean go to the coast together:  Campillo shoots them on the beach as two small figures in a huge sea-and-skyscape.  While Nathan moves towards the water to swim, Sean can’t get that far:  his puny form is literally stranded.  The aftermath to his eventual death, which occurs not in hospital but on the night of his return to the apartment that he and Nathan planned to share, is a confounding blend of pathos, humour and surprise.  On the morning after Sean has died, a succession of ACT UP colleagues arrives at the increasingly crowded apartment to pay their respects and plan Sean’s memorial.  His gently dignified mother (Saadia Bentaïeb), as well as offering refreshments to all-comers, helps to dress Sean for his coffin and takes part in an amusingly polite discussion with the group about the relative proportions of her son’s ashes that she will keep and they will throw at their next public demonstration (Sean wanted a political funeral).

    Later at the same gathering, Nathan asks Thibault if he’ll stay the coming night with him in the apartment.  In response, Thibault also asks a question – ‘What – fucking and everything?’  It’s one of 120 BPM ‘s more immediately startling moments when Nathan replies in the affirmative.  His motivation for sleeping with Thibault is open to interpretation.  Perhaps having sex keeps Nathan, on the first night of Sean’s death, in touch with life.  Perhaps the choice of someone whom his dead lover especially disliked is mixed up with Nathan’s remorse at having hastened Sean’s demise – and the end of his agony – with an extra shot of morphine.  That there isn’t a single obvious explanation is to the film’s credit.  Whatever his reasons for going to bed with Thibault, Nathan’s outburst of grief during their lovemaking is eloquent.

    Invited to introduce the London Film Festival screening that I attended, Robin Campillo declined to say much beforehand – because, he said, 120 BPM was already ‘rather long’ and, as the editor, he had to take the blame for that.   The editing is one of the glories of the film.   One minor but telling example:  when Nathan recalls his shock at seeing before-and-after magazine photographs of an American man ravaged by AIDS, these flash up on the screen.  The cutting conveys a real sense of Nathan’s actually seeing the images again.  120 BPM is long (140 minutes) but its length is justified by the richness and treatment of the subject matter (unlike some other films at this month’s Festival).  In Eastern Boys (2013), Campillo’s previous picture, the plotting was weak but he comes into his own with this marriage of documentary elements and intimate drama, which, by the way, is altogether superior to Dallas Buyers Club (2013).  120 BPM includes passages remarkable not just for dazzling technique but for the use of that technique to express a larger meaning.  (In this respect too, it was different from some other LFF offerings.)

    Visiting Sean in hospital, Thibault reports on the extravagant ideas some ACT UP members have for the major public demonstration to take place on the forthcoming Worlds AIDS Day – ideas that include pouring enough fake blood into the Seine to turn the river red.  (This hospital visit doesn’t lead to an easy reconciliation:  Sean eventually tells Thibault to leave, admitting that he can’t explain exactly why he finds his presence so offensive.)    On the day of the demo, a cross-bearing crowd moves through the streets of Paris.  When darkness falls, there’s an overhead view of them lying on the ground with crosses and candles.  Nathan is among them but then, as a counterpoint to the unity of the demonstrators, Campillo cuts to a club, where Nathan stands separated from the whirling activity of others by a curtain of dust particles bright in the club lights.  Then the Seine is flowing red – in Sean’s dream.  This flow of images epitomises the successful fusion of public and private in the film.  Accompanying them is Bronski Beat’s great ‘Smalltown Boy’, which perfectly distils the emerging and singular tone of tragic nostalgia.  (Not the least virtue of Arnaud Rebotini’s original music for 120 BPM is that its chords anticipate those of ‘Smalltown Boy’.)  The breathy quality of Jimmy Somerville’s lovely voice translates into Sean’s effortful breathing.

    In the Q&A that followed the screening, Campillo came across as likeably self-deprecating and honest.  Clare Stewart, the LFF director, informed him that his film recreated groundbreaking equal rights history and raised issues about marginalised communities that are so relevant today (or words to that effect).  She then asked why these themes appealed to him.  ‘Actually’, Campillo replied, ‘I wasn’t thinking about today’.  He went on to summarise the ways in which 120 BPM is and isn’t autobiographical.  Now in his mid-fifties, Campillo was involved with ACT UP in the 1990s (as was his co-writer Philippe Mangeot).  Nathan’s account of his first major relationship draws on Campillo’s experience – so does the scene in which his friend Max (Félix Maritaud) helps Sean’s mother dress his corpse.  His own friend’s mother, Campillo explained, was, unlike Sean’s, comically talkative while they were doing this.  In the film he modifies the tone of the dressing episode, virtually transferring the comedy to the division-of-the-spoils conversation about Sean’s ashes.  This adjustment chimes with Campillo’s remark in the Q&A that, while there was a bit of him in several characters, he felt it would have been too obvious to have a single alter ego.  He told the LFF audience his essential aim was to realise on screen an important period in his life – and pay tribute to the people he knew in it and the cause for which they worked together.  Making the film also revealed something unexpected to Campillo:  he hadn’t realised how little his predominantly young and gay cast knew about the AIDS activism of decades past.

    In a generally strong cast, the two leads stand out:  the screen presences and acting styles of Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Arnaud Valois are beautifully complementary.  120 battements par minute won the Grand Prix at Cannes earlier this year.  It’s a pity the French title is being altered for the worldwide (or, at least, the Anglophone world) release.  A movie name that has to explain itself in brackets is almost by definition a weak one – besides, the 120, as hinted above, is crucial to the conception of the piece[1].  More recently, the picture has been selected as France’s nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film in the 2018 Academy Awards.  How well it’ll fare in that competition remains to be seen but it’s much the best film of the ten that I saw at this year’s London Film Festival[2].

    7 October 2017

    [1]  Afternote:  The film was released in the UK in April 2018 as 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute).  I’ve edited this note by using that title – without the parenthesis! – throughout.

    [2]  Afternote:  It wasn’t even long-listed for the Oscar.  The film has won plenty of other prizes, among them six Césars, including Best Film.

     

  • Mudbound

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dee Rees (2017)

    This formally ambitious racial drama, shown at the London Film Festival, is based on the 2008 debut novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan.  I didn’t know beforehand that Mudbound was adapted from a novel but it doesn’t take long to guess – especially since the film, unusually, has no less than six narrative voice(over)s.   The unappealing title is the name of a flood-prone cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s.  Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) buys the land and relocates there from Memphis with his city-born wife Laura (Carey Mulligan), who’s reluctant to move, their two young daughters and Henry’s malignantly crabby father (Jonathan Banks).  Henry intends that the family will live in the neighbouring town of Marietta, from where he’ll drive to work on the farm each day.  When he discovers that the owner of the house he’s paid to rent in Marietta has cheated him by selling the property to another man, the McAllans have no option but to move into the cramped, primitive farmhouse.  Their humble living conditions give them more in common than they would otherwise have with the sharecroppers on their land:  the Atwoods (Dylan Arnold and Lucy Faust), a young white couple; and the African-American Jackson family – Hap (Rob Morgan), his wife Florence (Mary J Blige) and their several children.  Another thing the McAllans and the Jacksons have in common is that one of their number is fighting in Europe in World War II – the Jacksons’ eldest son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell), Henry’s younger brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund).

    In the opening scene of Mudbound, Henry and Jamie are attempting, in urgent haste because a storm is imminent, to dig a grave for their father.  After this prologue, the story moves back to 1939, when Laura and Henry first meet, and from there through the war years and the early post-war period, up to the point at which the story began.  A short epilogue completes the picture.  I’m guessing that the narrators of Hillary Jordan’s novel describe not just their feelings but also the events of the plot.   In the film, these multiple voices – of Laura, Henry, Hap, Florence, Ronsel and Jamie – aren’t needed to tell the story:  Dee Rees and Virgil Williams, who shares the screenplay credit with her, are doing that, from an essentially objective point of view.  Online summaries of the book suggest that the six characters, each in their different way, are prevented, in the time and place in which Mudbound is set, from expressing themselves.  While this is also true of the characters on screen, a filmmaker has other means – chiefly her actors’ faces– to get that message across.  The voiceovers occasionally supply significant information – for example, that Laura, when she first met Henry, was a thirty-one-year-old virgin and agreed to marry him largely out of gratitude for rescuing her from an old-maid future.  The actors’ voices on the soundtrack sometimes enrich the characterisations that the camera is recording.  For the most part, though, the multiple narrators are little more than a complicating decoration.  Perhaps they also contribute to Mudbound’s unfocused and episodic quality during its first half (where the different voices seem to be heard more often than they are later on).  Although there’s much of interest in the opening hour of the film, it doesn’t begin to gather momentum until Ronsel and Jamie return to their families after the war has ended.

    The film’s main strength comes from melding two familiar types of story and yielding something distinctive from their combination:  a tale of demobbed men struggling to acclimatise post-war is grafted onto a Jim Crow country melodrama.  The sequences describing Ronsel’s and Jamie’s wartime experiences aren’t imaginative but their legacy is potently realised.  Jamie’s experiences as a fighter pilot have traumatised him.  Ronsel has discovered that the racial segregation he’s used to at home doesn’t apply on the front line; he has also had a love affair with Resl (Samantha Hoefer), a white German girl.  Dee Rees does a particularly good job of describing the less blatantly offensive aspects of American racist conventions of the time – for example, the way that Laura, although kindly disposed towards the Jacksons, speaks to Florence with a natural condescension.  The same is true of Jamie’s attitude towards Ronsel, at least in the early stages of their curious friendship.  Rees also makes clear that working the Mudbound land is unrewarding for all concerned, regardless of race or economic circumstance.  A subplot concerning the ill-fated Atwoods is the starkest illustration of this.  Middle-class Laura’s politely aloof attitude towards white-trash Vera Atwood, until their last, shocking encounter, is another well-observed social detail.

    The central horror story is that of Ronsel, a young man whose life seems in greater peril in peacetime Mississippi than it was in wartime Europe.  The film’s atmosphere is increasingly ominous – you know, of course, that things are heading for a grim climax.  Tamar-Kali’s score is an insistent reminder.  Besides, the geography of the piece primes you for a Southern Gothic explosion.  You naturally wonder how it’s come about that the McAllan sons are preparing to bury their father, especially once it’s clear (as it is almost immediately) that he’s a vile racist.  The big finish is hardly unexpected:  Pappy, when he chances on evidence that Ronsel has fathered Resl’s child, gets together a lynch mob, including Klansmen, who torture Ronsel.  Jamie, in punishment for befriending the latter, is forced to choose which part of Ronsel’s body should be removed – eyes, tongue or genitals.  An earlier conversation between Jamie and Pappy, in which the father belittled his son’s military medals because Jamie had ‘never looked a man between the eyes’ before killing him, reeks of significance-to-come:  Jamie, once released by the posse, looks his father in the eyes before murdering him.   The predictability of all this doesn’t, however, make the torture sequence any less shocking – or stop you inwardly cheering the patricide.

    Except for Pappy, the main white characters are more complex than the black ones, whose virtues are more or less unqualified.  I can only speculate as to why this is.  The novelist Hillary Jordan is white and, I assume, a liberal.  Dee Rees is African-American but it’s clear enough (and the lyrics of a song played over the closing credits seem to confirm) that she means Mudbound, in spite of its historical setting, to reflect depressing aspects of race relations in America seventy years later.   Making the Jacksons morally ambiguous might get in the way of the political view Rees wants to convey.  Florence Jackson is a thoroughly admirable wife and mother, from whose nursing and housekeeping skills the McAllans benefit.  Hap is a thoroughly admirable husband and father, and a preacher well respected in the local black community.  We sometimes see in Hap’s eyes that it sticks in his craw to obey his white bosses but he knows co-operation is in his family’s best interests.  The Jackson children want to better themselves and their parents encourage this but Ronsel, when he returns to Mississippi, feels a duty to help his parents, especially with Hap still recovering from a serious leg injury.

    The Jacksons’ marital fidelity contrasts with the compromised relationship of Laura and Henry, and the longstanding mutual attraction between Laura and Jamie.  As indicated above, Laura admits the expediency of her agreeing to wed Henry.   One of the most emotionally rich scenes in the film comes before they marry, when Laura and the McAllan brothers go to a dance in Memphis.   Laura has just met Jamie for the first time and the spark between them is especially evident when they take the floor.  Henry perceives it but watches with an almost gratified calm: he knows the effect his brother has on women.  Jamie’s increasing alcohol dependency is familiar enough for a young man in his psychologically snarled-up situation but he’s far from a standard hopeless drunk.  He does constructive things – whether it’s getting to know Ronsel or putting together a shower that allows Laura to stay clean in greater privacy than she did before.  That Jamie does these things with a degree of self-interest makes him all the more convincing a character.

    Mudbound is strongly acted.  Jason Mitchell builds a powerful sense of Ronsel’s feelings of furious suffocation back home after the war.  As his father, Rob Morgan tends to read his lines deliberately but gives perhaps the most physically eloquent performance in the film – along with Mary J Blige’s sensitive, capable Florence.  Dee Rees makes effective use of Carey Mulligan’s ability to switch imperceptibly between looking plain and beautiful.  Because Mulligan is so incisive and, in her understated way, magnetic, it’s somewhat frustrating that Laura seems to recede from the centre of the story.  Jason Clarke is nuanced in the first part of the film:  it’s not his fault that the script narrows the personality of Henry once the family settles on the farm.  (Contrast the look he gives his brother and his wife-to-be at the dance with the standard jealous husband shot of Henry watching Laura watching Jamie later on.)  Garrett Hedlund, excellent as usual, captures Jamie’s mixture of charm and cynicism.   A quibble:  given how young Laura’s children are when America enters the war in December 1941, I was surprised that they excitedly recognise Jamie when he returns four years later.

    Although the film’s name predicts the prevailing colour scheme, the cinematographer Rachel Morrison gets more tonal variety from the landscape than might be expected.  The postscript sees Ronsel Jackson returning to Resl in Germany and meeting their young son for the first time.  While it’s a great relief that Ronsel survives his ordeal at the hands of the white racists, the price he has paid is too neatly symbolic:  it was his tongue that the torturers removed.    This is another element of the story that may work better in the book than it does on film.  On the printed page, we can easily accept the continuation of a narrative voice that can no longer actually speak (and feel the impact of this).  On screen, it seems wrong – a cheat – that we still hear Ronsel’s voiceover on the soundtrack, commenting on this last sequence.  Mudbound is narratively awkward.  It isn’t the expansive drama that its themes (and length – 135 minutes) might suggest.  All in all, though, it’s a very decent film.

    6 October 2017

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