It did not sound like the most exhilarating way to spend an afternoon: a 2 ½ hour film about AIDS victims in 1990s France fighting their disease—and pharmaceutical companies—for survival.
Robin Campillo’s “120 Beats Per Minute” blew me away with its energizing power and heartfulness. It shows the campaign of the ACT-UP Paris movement to gather forces in the HIV inflicted community to push pharmaceutical companies to move forward in their laboratory research. It is a movement that the director himself had a lead role in in the 1990s.
The first half of the film cross-cuts between impassioned debates among the ACT UP members, and an actual strategic “action” against Roche, a major French pharmaceutical company: an exciting subversive plot where AIDS inflicted victims barge through doors to squirt bladders of animal blood on the desks of indifferent pharmaceutical bureaucrats. The debates in the classroom are just as exciting. The camera swings from one participant to another as each boldly grapples with their disease, and the politics of the disease. Each opinion grips us: we listen with suspense as the questions fire. The characters in the debate—from a enthusiastic young woman leading the discussion to a man who refuses to admit the gravity of his illness---quickly become real people for us.
In the second half, the film focuses on the relationship between one radical militant Sean, and his growing love affair with a new member named Nathan. We are with the two in bed, while Nathan shows tenderness for his dying mate. We share the stories of how it is they both ended up infected---up until the very real, and heartbreaking, death at the end.
Still even this death transforms into a positive life-affirming experience. In the tour-de-force finale, the ACT UP group invades a champagne banquet of an insurance company, scattering the dead boy’s ashes on the fancy hors d’oeuvres before all the horrified guests. The film cross-cuts fast and rhythmically between the clouds of ashes and a scene of dancing and sexuality in a disco.
The message of this film: “We want to live!”
It is a film that not only has historical importance---capturing a spirit and a movement of the 1990s---but a universal appeal to all who have ever felt submerged by events, political or physical, beyond their control. It is testimony to the power of community.
Campillo’s “20 BPM” won the The Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes. Many journalists were outraged that it did not win The Palme d’Or.
I went to the sunny UNI-France pavilion to meet Robin Campillo, to hear his views.
I met an exceptionally articulate beaming man, full of the same positive energy of his film.
“This film is very ‘real’. How is it inspired from your personal experience with ACT UP?”
“I did this film about my memories. I was so fascinated by the ACT UP group. It was so much fun! I wanted the spectator to feel the same as I. Each meeting began with a speaker who introduced us. Afterwards it was like jumping in the sea! I did not always understand what they were talking about. So I did not want to explain all in my film. I have all these feelings and I put them together. The poetic images in my film comes from what ACT UP actually did. We put condoms on the obélisque of the Concorde!”
The debates in the film are so lively. We really feel we are there. What was your approach in making the film?
“I wanted to recreate the music of the voices: how they worked together. The way of talking. I searched for theater actors who could do that. There were so many different personalities, coming from sociologically diverse places. When we came together there was jubilation!The debates were very poetic, like music. In my film, I made sure to have big windows in the classroom. I did not want to have it to be a locked-up space.”
Are you involved in political movements now?
“Not like I was then. Political movements were more powerful in the 1990s than they are now. Back in the 90s, there was no internet. So we actually had to confront each other. Today it’s a weird situation. People get violent on Facebook instead of facing each other. Facebook is not brave. Facebook writers are protecting themselves. They are not in the streets.”
Why did you make this film now—instead of back then?
“When the epidemic started, I was studying filmmaking at the Fémis film school in Paris. If I have decided to make this film now, it’s to make a political film in a new way, with emotion and sensation, to be closer to the body politics.”
Can you compare the ACT UP movement in the US—where it originated—and France?
“In the 1990s, I was influenced by the US, where we were talking about gays and minorities. In the US, campaigns were organized to help gays with the AIDS epidemic. The French did not nothing. Even to say you are gay was a problem.”
What is the relevance of your film today?
“The film is very relevant. It has echoes to what is happening now, and especially in France, with its treatment of minorities. When you speak about community and minority in France, you are compared to Americans. We are a very Jacobin world in France. There is always a scapegoat. Back then it was the gays. Now laicity is the new religion [of oppression]. It is used against the Muslim world. The French now attack religions just as they once attacked sexual orientation. Attacking religions is a way to invade an individual’s private life. You have a lot of closets in France. The prejudice today is not about gays now, but about other groups. The former colonized peoples in France are seen as gays once were. Muslims seem to be a threat to the French, and everyone is talking about them. Being Muslim is the new ‘gay’.”
What do you think about the presidential elections in France?
“The worst thing is that if the extreme right does rise to power in France, it will be very hard to come back. And the very worst thing is that the right believes that is actually possible, which means they are out of their mind. These people hope to go to war. They want a civil war in France. Racism and xenophobia are really dangerous.”
And yet the right-wing Marine Le Pen speaks positively about gays—gay marriage etc.
Of course she does. She uses the gays against the Muslims. The Muslims are the target today. The right can be openminded if it can help to discriminate against others.
Watching your film provoked me—like many others, I am sure—to remember the friends I lost to AIDs in the 1990s. How much is your film a homage to your own friends who were victims and died?
I am more interested in people who are alive----in people who are alive and survived this moment of history. Because of their sickness, many HIV victims did not work back then. Their job was going to ACT UP meetings. They spent their own money on the movement. Today they lead precarious lives. They are still dealing with hard medication. I think when you are too obsessed with dead people you forget those who are alive. I recognize what the people who are alive have lost.
Your film constantly interposes images of death with images of life, with very powerful contrasts. Like the river that turns to blood, and then the scenes of sexual exhiliration.
I am not afraid of emphasis. Film can go from one extreme to another. Just like life goes one from point to another point, from one genre to another. These changes are metamorphosis. I want my film to recreate this metamorphosis....