IT is a successful time for films featuring gay subjects. From the Oscar-winning “Moonlight” (2016) to the celebrated “Call Me By Your Name” (2017), they are garnering critical acclaim and encouraging public discussion of how the struggle for acceptance endures today, even in societies which have legally enshrined equality.
“120 BPM (Beats per Minute)” is the latest such film. An unabashedly passionate depiction of the work of AIDS activists in Paris in the early 1990s, it has resonated deeply with audiences. At its premiere at the Cannes film festival last summer, critics were in tears; it won several awards, including the Grand Prix. At a recent preview in London, viewers sat dumbstruck during the credits before standing to applaud.
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The film’s protagonists are part of the Paris branch of ACT UP—the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. The film shows the collective strategising and arguing over how to rouse a society that is, as they see it, callously indifferent to thousands of gay people dying from AIDS each year in France. Their protests form much of the film’s drama as they campaign for the release of AIDS treatments and challenge prevailing homophobic attitudes.
The film opens with them storming a medical conference, handcuffing its speaker to a post and covering him in fake blood. It’s an unplanned escalation which prompts questions about whether violent stunts alienate people who might sympathise or compel them to listen to the message. They continue to shock and provoke, breaking into the offices of a pharmaceutical company, dousing its walls with fake blood and accusing its staff of being “assassins […] with blood on your hands”. They forcibly enter a school and distribute condoms to its pupils.
Throughout these political statements, a tragic personal narrative anchors “120 BPM”. Nathan and Sean, the two main characters, fall in love; Sean subsequently dies of AIDS in his 20s. Their relationship is an assertion of the possibilities of love in the direst of times, and their intimacy is a fervent defence of gay romance and life in a society that often views gay people with contempt and devalues the lives of AIDS sufferers. In one scene at the school, Sean leans in to kiss Nathan in front of a student. The boy dismisses their protests saying: “I’m never going to get your AIDS bullshit, I’m not a fag.”
The truculent and captivating tactics are faithful to the spirit of ACT UP’s campaigning work and Robin Campillo and Philippe Mangeot, the writers, were involved with the organisation in the 1990s. Founded in New York in 1987, its activists’ work included marching up to the White House, dousing its fences in fake blood and throwing the ashes of one of their members inside its grounds to protest the first Bush administration’s fumbling response to the AIDS epidemic. ACT UP’s Paris chapter was founded in 1989 and its members used similarly public tactics to their American counterparts, including covering the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde with a giant pink condom. “120 BPM” also shows some stunts which Mr Campillo imagines the collective had staged, such as turning the River Seine red with fake blood.
Yet “120 BPM” is moving because it feels far more than a reflection on a bygone moment of AIDS activism and gay stigma. Despite its setting, the film’s close-up shots and its characters personal battles give it an urgent and perennial feel. In its portrayal of ACT UP’s indefatigable fight for medical treatments and equality, it captures the dogged persistence required to spur inert authorities and hasten social change.
These messages about the contingency of progress and the trials of activism remain applicable and instructive for gay people and AIDS sufferers, but also for other contemporary activist movements. Today’s political moment—in which some fear that populist politics are fuelling hatred towards racial, national and sexual minorities—may explain why the film has echoed with so many audiences across the world. “I think the film has been longed for because we still need this militant activism,” Mr Campillo told a French film website. His characters’ irreverent crusading and euphoric protest, even as death looms, are a fitting tribute to such work.