BPM (Beats Per Minute) [120 battements par minute] ***** (2017, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Arnaud Valois, Adèle Haenel, Antoine Reinartz, Félix Maritaud) – Movie Review

Robin Campillo’s 2017 French activism film and AIDS drama BPM (Beats per Minute) is emotionally overwhelming, incredibly powerful, and truly inspiring. There shouldn’t be a dry eye in the house at the end – and long after the film finishes too.

Robin Campillo’s superlative, devastating film BPM (Beats Per Minute) won four awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 – the FIPRESCI Critics’ Prize, the François Chalais Award, Grand Prize of the Jury and the Queer Palm – but alas the Palme d’Or eluded it. It is, as they said at Cannes, ‘a film about love. A film about life. Life stronger than death. A film as a glimpse of hope.’

Campillo’s overwhelming, incredibly powerful, truly inspiring French activism film and AIDS drama is France’s powerhouse Foreign-Language Oscar Entry. I wish it very good luck. It will need it as there is a record 92 countries submitting entries this year. Prizes or not, 120 battements par minute is an instant Queer classic.

And it shows just how minorities can fight back against prejudiced majorities, with a good heart, great spirit and much courage. This is the glimpse of hope. The oppressed young people overcame French President François Mitterand (1981-95) and all the old fogies in power, had their say and won the day.

BPM (Beats Per Minute) is an ensemble movie, a group portrait of passionate, committed Parisian AIDS activists in the late Eighties and early Nineties, starting in the urgent thick of things with introducing some new members followed by a rowdy group meeting, leading to a piece of on-site activism.

The members of the non-violent intervention Parisian Act-Up group are passionate about fighting the indifference of politicians, teachers, pharmaceutical companies and some of the public towards AIDS in the early Nineties, after the disease has claimed countless lives for nearly ten years.

However, it eventually focuses on the relationship between new Act Up-Paris activist Nathan (Arnaud Valois), who is H1V negative, and H1V positive Sean Dalmazo (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a radical militant.

Sean shakes Nathan’s world, and their thing turns into love, but then Sean starts getting very sick, though he throws his last bits of his rapidly waning strength into the fight. The other main characters are committed activist Sophie (Adèle Haenel) and the group’s spiky leader Thibault (Antoine Reinartz), who likes the look of Nathan but falls out with Sean. Félix Maritaud also stars as Max.

This extraordinary, heart-wrenching film brought Pedro Almodóvar, the Cannes jury leader, to tears: ‘I loved the movie. I cannot love more. I was touched since the very beginning till absolutely the end and after the end. Campillo tells the story of real heroes, that we saved many lives.’ It is true. There shouldn’t be a dry eye in the house at the end and after the end.

The title is the average heart rate.

Campillo and his co-screenwriter Philippe Mangeot drew on their own experiences with Act Up-Paris to write the script.

Director Robin Campillo and his cast at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

Controversially, and with a divided jury, the Swedish museum satire The Square won the Palme d’Or at Cannes over 120 battements par minute, which had to make do with the second prize of Grand Prix. And it was entirely overlooked at the Oscars. Though it was selected as the French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards, it was not even nominated.

It is screened at the BFI London Film Festival on 7 October 2017, one of the four best films of the festival, along with Call Me by Your Name, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Loveless, which won the Best Film award.

In France, it won six César Awards, including Best Film (Meilleur Film). It is nominated as Foreign Language Film of the Year at the London Critics Circle Film Awards in 2019.

The cast are Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Sean Dalmazo, Arnaud Valois as Nathan, Adèle Haenel as Sophie, Antoine Reinartz as Thibault, Félix Maritaud as Max, Médhi Touré as Germain, Aloïse Sauvage as Eva, Simon Bourgade as Luc, Catherine Vinatier as Hélène, Saadia Ben Taieb as Sean’s Mother, Ariel Borenstein as Jérémie, Théophile Ray as Marco, Simon Guélat as Markus, Jean-François Auguste as Fabien, Coralie Russier as Muriel, Samuel Churin as Gilberti, and François Rabette as Michel Bernin.

Félix Maritaud went on to make Sauvage and Jonas in 2018.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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