Robin Campillo | 120 battements par minute (120 BPM) / 2017

the beat goes on

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robin Campillo and Philippe Mangeot (screenplay), Robin Campillo (director) 120 battements par minute (120 BPM) / 2017

 

One of the earliest scenes in the truly memorable movie 120 BPM (beats per minute) takes us to a large auditorium wherein a seasoned member of the Act Up community explains to several new volunteers the procedures and decorum of their meetings. Members do not clap for the various viewpoints and arguments; they only click their fingers in approval in order to not overpower the voices of others by drowning out their speech. Debate takes place only in the large auditorium room, private conversations and hallway chatter are prohibited. Because of the health conditions of many of the HIV-positive and full AIDS participants, no smoking is allowed in the hall, only in the outside hallway. 

     These are only a few of the hurried explanations that proceed the meeting we are about to observe, although by this time we have already become something other than observers or voyeurs: any empathetic and intelligent member of the audience of this film has already been swept up in the French version of the Act Up group debates, operations, and gestures that will whirl him or her up into the vortex of 140 minutes before dropping the viewer exhausted, in tears, laughing, and applauding the numerous people he has come to know so well. Just remembering it now, two days later, I am still overwhelmed, my eyes tearing, my heart racing far faster than the normal heart rate which this movie’s film advertises.

    Like these new members, we are at first quite overwhelmed and confused by the new faces we encounter and the quick expression of their proposed actions. But that is precisely what this remarkable work demands. And if you go along with it, get up caught up in the reality of this world—there is absolutely nothing one could describe as “plot” in this breathtaking expression of the young men and women fighting for their own and others’ lives—you will be rewarded with all the pleasures and horrors of a youthful life and death. For a 78-year-old man who lived through this period at just a few years older than these beautiful dying youths, moreover, there was also a great deal of guilt and pure astonishment.

    I will immediately share my evaluation of this film, since I will have little time in this hurried description of some of the film’s figures shared and singular experiences: this is surely the most skillful and heartfelt film about the dreadful queer encounter with AIDS outside of the earliest of such films which I now want to view all over again: Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs of 1985, Arthur J. Bressan’s  Buddies of the same year, and Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances from 1986.

    Even in the earliest of scenes we have already been introduced to several important characters in this work, including one of the newcomers, Nathan (Arnaud Valois), a longer member of the group Sean Dalmazo (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), the young man, Marco (Théophile Ray) who mixes up the batches of colored liquid the group uses to fill their balloons with what pretends to be blood, and group leaders, Sophie (Adèle Haenel), and Thibault (Antoine Reinartz), yet as neophytes we don’t yet perceive them as individuals, and the film encourages in its first half to think as the group, an argumentative gathering of almost all HIV-positive and AIDS victims who speak with the authority and impatience of the deaths each of them is facing.

    One of their first attacks in the film is upon the Melton Pharm corporation which has been working on an AIDS cure or at least combinations of drugs to keep AIDS from developing in HIV-positive patients. The workers at this important pharmaceutical research labs, seeing themselves, as the good guys working to find cures and solutions, cannot comprehend the activities of the Act Up community. But for the group, Melton’s decision not to even release their findings until months later in a Berlin gathering of a number of such companies is untenable. Time is not something these individuals and the thousands of others they represent have; they want information now, and have designated individuals within their group to be able to explain even the most complex of vaccines and medical developments. Yet AIDS researchers, constantly downplaying the general public’s and particularly their patients’ abilities to comprehend their experiments, keep all their data secret.

    Feeling it is time to demonstrate their frustrations, the Act Up group do precisely that, entering the pristine offices of Melton Pharm, terrifying employees with their shouts and actions through the very existence of their bodies in the same space, as well as desecrating their white walls with  their balloons of fake human “blood.” We watch it all close up, even their clumsy mistakes of, at first, moving in on the wrong floor and attempting to debate their concerns with a head of the lab, who simply cannot comprehend the urgency they feel.

    Our shared attendance these meetings, moreover, witnesses the egalitarian group for what it also is, a gathering of mostly men and some women speaking out in an urgent chatter of their multiple viewpoints and ultimate goals. With clothes still streaked with the fake blood, they assign blame for their mistakes, reevaluate their strategies, report on the reactions of other queer or AIDS-support groups, analyze ways to increase the volume of their voices, and just plain squabble the way any large family might. What is amazing is that nearly every voice gets heard, from the most seasoned veteran of their maneuvers to the newbies who have just joined up.

  In their meetings they manage to not only to evaluate their success and failures, but to plan for a new campaign, this involving a bevy of gay cheerleaders to chant new slogans for the upcoming Gay Pride Day march.

    If voices rise in pitch, tempers momentarily flare, and resolve seems sometimes out of reach, director Campillo keeps these dedicated individuals in motion at nearly all the moments of the film by showing them, even after they leave the meeting hall, in bars and clubs dancing under the blaze of strobe lights with dust whirling across the room, through the complex pulse of medical pictures of the blood cells beneath their skin that keep them alive or bring them closer yet to death, or the detritus of floating pamphlets and parade party streamers. The movement of their bodies, minds, and voices throughout this film is nearly non-stop. As Simran Hans writes in her review in The Guardian:

 

“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.

     …Conversation, dancing and sex are all presented as essential, inseparable forms of direct action. 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.”

 

    In the midst of meetings and protests, the only momentary pauses, in fact, are represented by the mashups of bodies, primarily represented by Nathan and Sean, who meeting at that first gathering, quickly fall in love, Sean with full-blown AIDS, Nathan now simply HIV-positive. In a darkened room, they discuss whether or not to use condoms (Sean still insisting on their use, although at the last moment both ignoring them since the disease has already spread), and quietly reveal how they were infected. Sean, showing signs of the disease’s infection, reveals that he was gifted with the disease at the early age of 16, infected by a math teacher who was married, perhaps not even knowing that he himself was infected. In a brief moment of reverie, we observe the young boy losing his virginity, the very moment of his infection. Nathan, the quieter but stronger of two offers to care for Sean, planning to set the two of them up together in a new apartment.

     But meanwhile, there is work to be done, including the resplendent Gay Pride parade, the visit to the high school that Hans mentions above, and meetings, in one in which Thibault attempts to explain the newest developments, the pills and their consequences, and what has been leaked as possible new solutions.   

    At another meeting the radicals, Sean among them, attack an older woman named Hélène (Catherine Vinatier), whose teenage son has contracted HIV through blood transfusion. She has publicly pushed for the idea that politicians should be tried and jailed for their mishandling of blood screening, but to these radicals her argument goes against the Act-Up principles since they see prison as an unsafe place where people actually get infected. She is astounded by their hostility and is comforted by the ministrations of Thibault and Sophie, which further alienates Sean and others from their current leaders.

     When Sean is hospitalized and Thibault comes to visit him out of love and comradeship, Sean simply sends him away. When Nathan finally arrives, Sean expresses his fears of dying, the pain he’s experiencing, and most of all the loss of direct bodily contact with his lover. There, under the camera’s lens, Nathan jacks off his friend on his hospital bed, making it clear that for the dying as well as for the living love and sex are necessary to sustain life.

     From this point on, until near the end of the work, the movie veers away from the public forum to the personal, as Sean, now near death, is delivered up in a hospital bed to the new apartment his lover Nathan has created for him. Nathan and Sean’s mother, now his caretakers, help him to the couch, where for the first time in the film the firebrand Sean breaks down in uncontrollable sobs. The new life he and Nathan have planned in that apartment has been for naught.

      He and Nathan have formed a pact, and deep in the night, while Sean is sleeping, Nathan rises and places a potent amount of morphine in his lover’s drip, euthanizing him as they have agreed. Soon after, one by one, some of his Act-Up family begin show up at his door, Thibault arrives, followed by Sophie, Marco and his mother, others of the group, each introducing themselves to Sean’s mother, visiting the corpse (only Marco refuses to view it), and mill around in inevitable dread that usually energizes them, as Nathan, like a lost sleepwalker, attempts to make them coffee and find something to feed the starving friends.

   In the last major action of the film, we observe a gala affair, with sandwiches and desserts spread out on the tables, at a health-insurance conference. The Act-Up forces suddenly break into the room, and according to the dead boy’s wishes, toss Sean’s ashes out over this spread of food, wine, champagnes, and chocolates. Some lie down on the floor to simulate their own deaths.

     But the film ends with the beat repeating as these same survivors take to the dance floor, not ready to stop breathing until they bodies wear out from the opportunistic diseases that creep in to stop their hearts.

      Guardian reviewer Hans notes that most mainstream cinema such as Philadelphia (1993) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013), have treated the history of the gay AIDS crisis with “hospital gloves,” framing “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.”

     Unfortunately, given the early 1990s timeline of the film, we know that probably all of these cinematic representations of real people died in the years following, still without a viable solution to their conditions.

     Although in recent years there have been amazing advances made in keeping HIV-positive individuals alive, when Trump was re-elected he ceased all US funding to help individuals elsewhere in the world, particularly in the continent of Africa where women now see the higher rates of infection. On the very cusp of a true vaccine for the disease, Trump cut most of the financial grants.

     Just as a reminder, according to the 2024 UNAIDS report, approximately 40.8 million people globally were living with HIV. 1.2 million people were newly infected with HIV, and 630,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses that year.

     Since the start of the epidemic between 73.4 million to 116.4 million people have become infected with HIV, approximately 44.1 million dying of the epidemic.

     Gay men having sex with other men still constitute the second highest level of infection at 7.6% with only transgender people representing a higher percentage at 8.5%. People who inject drugs, sex workers, and people in prisons are also represented in the high-level groups, but obviously these statistics depend upon those who are willing to admit to their sexuality, drug use, or employment in the sex industry.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).