“BPM (Beats Per Minute)” is a French movie that recreates a particular moment in the AIDS crisis through the lives of several ACT UP living in Paris. From the first minute of the film, which plunges the audience into an ACT UP meeting, “BPM” has vitality and directness, a sense of witnessing life in the moment.
It’s the third film written and directed by Robin Campillo, who previously made “They Came Back” — the basis for the TV series, “The Returned” — and “Eastern Boys,” a great film about a French businessman and an Eastern European prostitute that never got a proper release in this country. “BPM” is based on Campillo’s own memories of the early 1990s, when he himself was a member of ACT UP, and the film has all the strengths and some of the weaknesses of a story taken from real life.
What comes across most strongly in “BPM” is the desperation of the time period. Most of the characters in the film are very worried that they’re going to die, not in a matter of years, but in weeks or months, and so they’re scared and angry and want to do something about it. Some of the best scenes in “BPM” are ACT UP meetings, in which these people, who are essentially on the same side, argue fiercely over strategies and tactics.
In these scenes, it’s difficult to know which side of these passionate arguments are right or wrong, if either. Sometimes they seem to be choosing between two or three equally fruitless courses of action. At other times, we get to see the force of what they’re doing, as the movie recreates several of their demonstrations, such as barging into high school classrooms and giving students information on safe sex.
“BPM” follows two stories, one personal, one political. The personal story concerns the emerging relationship between an HIV Negative man, Nathan (Arnaud Valois) — a character that’s more or less a stand-in for the filmmaker — and Sean (Nahuel Perez Biscayart), one of the most fiery of the activists and one of the most ill, a terrified, audacious and altogether unforgettable personality.
The film’s political story deals with ACT UP’s fight to have a pharmaceutical lab release its findings concerning a new possible AIDS treatment, one involving the use of something new, known as protease inhibitors. Throughout the film there is the agonizing sense of watching people struggling to keep from drowning, while rescue ships are just being spotted way off on the horizon.
At 140 minutes, “BPM” is a big investment, and as time wears on, the sameness of some of the scenes causes it to flag. All the same, “BPM” is a true and committed document, a worthy piece of filmmaking that keeps faith with the people it memorializes.
MOVIE REVIEW
“BPM (Beats Per Minute)”
Grade: B
Starring Arnaud Valois and Nahuel Perez Biscayart. Directed by Robin Campillo. In French with English subtitles.
Unrated. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 57 minutes.
Bottom line: Worthy French film with a political story
