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.