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).
