120 battements par minute

Tragic account of the early 90s AIDS epidemic, and the actions of a group of activists in Paris. It's a very dialogue heavy film but also intertwines a tender love story. Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is absolutely astounding as 'Sean'. And the acting is so hugely impressive across the board, it almost feels like the viewer is attending the activists weekly meetings at times. A powerful film.

This movie is not perfect, but its flaws are outshone by its facets. The most sparkling among those is Arnaud Valois, who is smoking hot as Nathan, one of the ACT UP campaigners who this film follows. Good acting, a warm heart and a realism that is hard to find in big idea movies are also highlights of this film. Yes, an awful lot of it takes place in meetings in a lecture theatre, but these scenes actually had my heart racing, so true were they to the reality of activist politics - trying to decide if you should speak up or let a point pass, understanding both sides of an argument but knowing that the purpose of a meeting is to make a choice, hating someone's ideology but trying to maintain a working relationship with them. In this way, the movie finds its relevance to today. If politics is to be taken back from careerists and corporations to instead deal with real problems such as climate change and growing income and wealth inequality, it will require everyday people to take their cue from 120 Battements Par Minute and turn up to meetings, argue points of order and collectively decide how to act.

The two main shortcomings of the film are its earnestness and its length. Even just cutting fifteen minutes from it could have made the film easier to take, and there is probably half an hour that could have gone. In some ways it's stuck trying to tell a Hollywood story at a European pace, and as a consequence it does drag at times.

I was prepared for the earnestness, as I had seen the previews, but there are still a few times when it felt more like instruction than entertainment. However, there are also moments of levity and it's worth giving up an extra half hour of your time to see a film that is as profound, important and relevant as this one.

An intelligent yet visceral film about the gay community in '80s Paris, which starts brilliantly – focusing on the protests and meetings of Act Up, a group of guerrilla AIDS activists – before turning into a film about a man dying of the illness.

No matter how compassionately, credibly and intimately it does that, segueing from a film about ideas to one about the individual, contrasting the character's dynamism and beauty with his pain- ravaged impotence, and showing the body – not the city – as the battleground, it's ground we've covered countless times before, and (at the risk of sounding awful) it made the movie increasingly tedious.

At its best, this confrontational, unsentimental but humanistic film has unexpected echoes of Melville's Army in the Shadows, which looked at action, division and necessity within the French Resistance, and I understand why it included so many sequences of illness and sex, but those elements don't seem as interesting as the story it started to tell. When it returns to it in those final moments, loaded with the suffering and sadness of what's gone before, the results are admittedly astounding.

Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is absolutely terrific as Sean, a founding member, Mesut Őzil-alike and all-round complex human being, first introduced to us justifying the fact that he and his mates have handcuffed a government official to a post during his team's PowerPoint presentation.

"BPM" (2017 release from France; 140 min.; original title "120 battements par minute" or "120 beats per minute") brings the story of a group of activists in Paris, France who are trying to raise awareness as to the deadly epidemic going through the gay community in the early 90s. As the movie opens, the Paris branch of ACT UP is welcoming 4 new members to its ranks. We witness the meeting where there is strong debate as to what action to take. Along the way, the movie focuses on one particular guy, Sean, as he struggles, health and otherwise. To tell you more of the plot would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: this is the latest movie of French director Robin Campillo, who previously gave us the excellent "Eastern Boys". Here he goes a very different direction, looking back at the dark days when AIDS was raging and little or certainly not enough was done by the government (with multiple stabs at then-president Mitterand) and the pharmaceutical industry. One of the strengths of the movie is that Campillo on multiple occasions lets the scenes play out without hurrying. There is little or no music to speak off in the movie, and again that only results in the film being ever more impactful (the last 40 min. pack an emotional wallop). Even though the Sean character is central, the movie comes across as an ensemble piece, with lots of stellar performances. Last but certainly not least, when watching this, I couldn't help but think back to that other AIDS movie from 2 decades ago, the Tom Hanks-starring "Philadelphia", in the "Hollywood version" of what AIDS was about. "BPM" easily blows "Philadelphia" out of the water. Bottom line: regardless of how you personally feel about the AIDS epidemic in the early 90s, "BPM" brings a sobering look and is nothing short of a masterful movie.

"BPM" premiered at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where it was met with immediate critical acclaim (winning, among others, the "Grand Prix" award--in essence the silver medal as compared to the "Palm d'Or" gold medal). I happen to catch this movie during a recent family visit in Belgium. The early evening screening where I saw this at in Antwerp, Belgium, was attended very nicely, somewhat to my surprise. I would think this will eventually make it to US theaters, although given the nature of the film, this certainly cannot be taken for granted. If you have a chance to check it out, I'd encourage you to do so.

A story with a particular historical moment in mind has been rendered timeless. A random first generation Gameboy generates a temporal whiplash, as the film's events are portrayed as contemporary catastrophes. Silence equates to death, and the team meeting in a college lecture hall has dwindling numbers, yet deafening shouts.

A prejudicial plague scorches France, bringing an already tight-knit community into a blood brotherhood. ACT UP is a guerrilla group full of eventual corpses. The HIV epidemic has threatened their love and survival. Pharmaceutical companies have cubical indifference as antidotes are sluggishly distributed by financial logistics.

As the non-violent vigilantes face just as many internal conflicts as press-generated woes, their operations grow in scale and creativity. Their weekly conferences have an intentional cadence complete with respectful snaps, hisses, and hand signals designed to facilitate the mutual understanding that has gone extinct beyond the university walls.

Sean is one of he founding members, and has some of the worst test results. He is the loudest in any given demonstration, and celebrates harder than all his peers. ACT UP is Sean's final lifeline, and his involvement resounds as a funeral dirge among a thunderous parade.

Campillo has delivered another dialogue driven barrage of human desperation. The sprinkling of establishing shots offer a reprieve from the claustrophobic disputes between the positives and the businessmen impartial to death. An important angle to an understated tragedy that shaped legislation in the most vital ways.