ReaderKenka
Let's be realistic.
MusicChat
It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.
Adeel Hail
Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.
drtodds
"BPM (Beats Per Minute)" (France 2017) With this film I have finally completed watching the Trifecta of Great Queer Cinema of 2017!
Set in the early 1990's, this is the story of ACT UP -- Paris, a rebel activist group composed of those infected with HIV/AIDS and their allies. Their mission: to educate the public on HIV/AIDS & safe sex practices; to change the public perception and dialogue of the epidemic; and to pressure politicians and pharmaceutical companies to take action in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
At times the film (clocking in at nearly 2 & 1/2 hours) drags a bit...especially when delving into some of the medical/scientific specifics of HIV or the laborious in-house debates at ACT UP's weekly meetings. But, the end result is a powerful, dark, and heavy testimony to the importance of political activism....and the struggles many in our community faced during the early days of the AIDS Era. Intermixed are themes of friendship, the power of community, and seeking love in the face of fear. This film is not as easy to watch at "Call Me By Your Name" or "God's Own Country" but certainly worth the added effort! [5/5]
thirtyfivestories
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.
Joe Stemme
ACT UP was an activist group that sprung up in the New York City AIDS community. BPM is a bracing energetic look at its sister group in Paris in the 90s. To it's credit, BPM Director Robin Campillo and writer Philippe Mangeneot don't shy away from how controversial the organization was in general society as well as with other AIDS activist groups, and indeed, within the ACT UP itself. This isn't mere hagiography, but a living breathing testament to the era. Much of the movie plays as a fly on the wall look at the issues and conflicts both outside and inside the group and its members. Campillo enlivens some of the dry technical talk with sporadic montage outbursts. But, they aren't just mere scene breaks, but, function as a way of showing these are dynamic three-dimensional people - not just "victims". About midway, there's a long sex scene that, while intensely intimate, also brilliantly weaves in many of the movie's themes. The scene is between on of ACT UP Paris' co-founders Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) and a newer member Nathan (Arnaud Valois). From that point on the movie shifts from a more general look at the group to focus more on Sean and his declining health. It's a risky structural move, and not one that is entirely successful. While it is no doubt important to personalize the crisis on a personal level, it unbalances the whole a bit. It's also more than a little protracted, and feels rhythmically out of place with the better paced rest of the piece. It does lead to one particularly vivid final act of demonstration among the other members of ACT UP Paris.BPM is one of the best movies on the AIDS crisis, joining another excellent French film, SAVAGE NIGHTS (1992) on that list. It's difficult, it's sometimes hard to watch, but, it's refreshingly alive unlike all too many films these days.
Ruben Mooijman
'120 Battements par minute' is about the protest movement Act Up Paris, which tried to put aids on the map as a major problem. The film is set about thirty years ago, when there was no efficient treatment yet against aids. There is at least one other film about this era and about this theme: 'Dallas Buyers Club'. Both films show how desperate aids patients were to get their hands on promising new medication. Both films show what the disease can do to a human being. Both films show the ignorance and prejudice of that period.The American film is a clever, well-made and well-written film in which the development of the lead character is central. But the French movie is slow-moving, lacks any suspense and doesn't seem to have any central focal point.It starts by showing, in excruciating length, the weekly meetings of the Act Up members, who more often than not embark on endless discussions about something as mundane as the slogan for a campaign poster. They also try to disturb official meetings, and invade a pharmaceutical company which refuses to release the test results of a certain kind of drug.This last story element offers some dramatic possibilities, but the film makers don't elaborate on it. This becomes clear when, in one scene, the managers of the pharmaceutical company are invited to explain their policy to the Act Up members. Instead of showing this exchange of differing opinions, and thus creating some much-needed dramatic development, the story moves away from the pharmaceutical company to the experiences of one individual Act Up member. Suddenly, he becomes the protagonist, and we see him struggling with the disease.Throughout the whole film, I kept on thinking: what's the point? Where is this story heading? Why is the first half of the film about a group of people fighting for a cause, and the second half about one individual fighting against a disease? The problem is also that the urgency is gone. Most of the things Act Up is angry about, are solved now. Very few people in the western world die of aids anymore, and everyone is aware of what the risk factors are. The makers of 'Dallas Buyers Club' knew this. That film was not so much about aids, it was about how one particular man handled aids. In '120 Battements par minute', the disease is still very much the lead character.
