Atwo-hour historical drama about gay activism in the late 1980s/early 1990s – with subtitles! – might sound like a hard sell, but French writer-director Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute is also a deep house opera, an urgent, steamy love story and a jubilant battle cry that demands to be witnessed. Centring on the activist group Act Up-Paris, an offshoot of the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power that started in New York in 1987, it serves as a snapshot of those who resisted in the early days of the disease’s global pandemic. The film lives its “politics in the first person”, showing how Act Up lobbied for legislation, research and treatment for those with HIV/Aids, while also tracking a tender romance between two of its members.
Campillo places the viewer bang in the middle of the Act Up community, staging one of the first scenes at an introductory meeting. Like the new recruits, we learn the organising principles (and the rules) from the inside. Fresh from a demonstration, members wearing fake-blood-splattered T-shirts explain that – in this lecture hall – democracy means transparency. There will be no clapping (just clicking) so as not to drown out those speaking, and all debate will take place in the room (private conversations and hallway chatter are prohibited).
The tension and infighting Campillo shows is riveting and edifying. This isn’t the rose-tinted memory of an overlooked political movement, but the pulling of the afflictive past into the present tense. And what could be more afflictive than love? Dramatic personal stakes are introduced as militant HIV-“poz” livewire Sean (the scene-stealing Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) and shy, handsome new member Nathan (Arnaud Valois) are drawn into each other’s orbits. Yet Campillo is careful to cast the Aids crisis as both personal tragedy and social epidemic.
A bird’s-eye view shot of the group lining the streets of Paris with their bodies – a corpse parade – is cut with archive footage of the real die-in in 1989, linking Act Up-Paris with France’s history of civil resistance. This is Campillo’s great gift: the scale of the history being explored is never compromised, despite the film’s growing interest in the intimate relationships on the ground.
Sean holds up a sign that reads “SILENCE = MORT”. If silence is death, so is stillness: this is a film in perpetual forward motion. Campillo frequently interjects the film’s talkiness with club scenes that fade in and out, capturing people kissing, dancing and sweating at sensual close-range.
The editing moves fluidly between linear narrative and memory; in one scene set to Mr Fingers’s 1992 track What About This Love, a playground kiss turns into a club reverie that transforms into a sex scene that transitions into the memory of one character’s virginity loss (also the moment of his infection). In another club scene, the camera catches on the dust particles lit by strobe lights, which drift up and morph into abstract images of floating blood cells.
Much like Act Up’s non-hierarchical structure, conversation, dancing and sex are all presented as essential, inseparable forms of direct action – and all are vital parts of the film’s DNA. Whether in scenes of the group storming high schools to distribute condoms and leaflets about STDs, or a hospital bed hand-job offered as an act of love, the film doesn’t shy away from sex.
Nor should it. Mainstream films such as Philadelphia (1993) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013) were careful to treat the solemn history of the Aids crisis with hospital gloves, but this tendency towards tasteful seriousness frames their central journeys as a stoic and sexless death march. What feels revolutionary – and revelatory – about this film and its characters is the way they resist that urge, managing to find moments of galvanising fury and ecstatic joy while in the grip of debilitating disease. Electronic musician Arnaud Rebotini’s dissonant, humming, house-inflected score – and the metronome-like heartbeats that underscore the action – are reminders that, even on their deathbed, a person has a pulse. In its dying gasps, the film grasps at life.
