BPM (Beats Per Minute)

BPM (Beats Per Minute)

In 1959, the writer and philosopher Guy Debord made a film. He called it “On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time.” It is another name you could give to “BPM (Beats Per Minute).”

This movie earns that title by being about a fictionalized story set in the 1990s and based on real events of the Paris branch of ACT UP, an AIDS activism group that was responsible for some of the most electrifying protests of their era. At one point in the film, members storm a stage during a government presentation on AIDS; their shock tactics get a little out of hand, let’s say. The movie then cuts to a meeting after the fact, where they compare notes, admit fault, express humorous confusion at the contradictions between individual accounts and hash out what to do next.

There is unapologetic sexiness here: Campillo finds room for several love stories amid urgent debates about which kind of insurrection is more effective in fighting fatal disease. But there’s also something singularly radical happening just beyond that: To watch this film is to be brought into confrontational intimacy with other people’s bodies.

Sometimes it feels like theater; sometimes it feels like documentary or melodrama or thriller. What unites these modes isn’t so much style as substance or rather, substances. Campillo constantly invites us to observe how different drugs affect characters’ behavior; he shows us why certain protest tactics are as infectious as any viral load; he makes us feel how falling in love can be not just an act of resistance but also an act toward it.

This is all heady stuff but never abstract: “BPM” remains grounded in lived experience throughout its sprawling runtime. We see how ACT UP members become family not because they share something as common as blood many don’t know they’re positive until years later but because they share something as precious as time. The film’s clever use of non-linear editing ensures that we keep moving backward and forward with them, but it also (contrary to popular belief) always moves us closer not just to the characters but to ourselves, our own histories and failures and futures.

At its center is Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a wide-eyed young man who comes bursting into ACT UP meetings like he’s just figured out how to save the world. “BPM” follows his arc from firebrand to fire-starter; it is a testament both to Pérez Biscayart’s astonishing range and the quiet power of radical community.

But if Sean is the heart of this movie, then Arnaud Valois’ Nathan is its soul. He is an HIV-negative newcomer who falls for Sean even before he realizes he’s falling for himself; their love story becomes a kind of origin myth, reminding us all at once how much we’ve lost and how much we have left to fight for. There are countless other characters in “BPM,” each one more vividly realized than the last and each one given enough screen time to make us dread their deaths.

In the scenes where they are introduced, none of these characters seem like stock types. The performers make them into specific people, not just ideas. We follow Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a small, lightning-quick agitator equal parts logical and charismatic; what little romantic thread runs through the movie is between him and Nathan (Arnaud Valois), a hunky but more retiring newcomer whose HIV-negative status initially sets off alarm bells among the group. Their love story is matter-of-fact and very sexy and also sad.

What this movie does beautifully, painfully, necessarily is remind us that “the political is personal” was never just some fuzzy postmodernity catchphrase. BPM re-creates with terrifying clarity an era in which people died because governments didn’t want to acknowledge that a certain virus could be transmitted heterosexually or nonintravenously; here many regard ACT UP’s tactics as “extremist,” while worldwide authorities basically agree with one French official’s early-’90s assessment that AIDS was nature’s punishment for deviant behavior and thus not exactly deserving of urgent attention.

But this isn’t one of those movies about how great it is that someone stood up to power we know all about those already. No: It makes you feel who these people were, activists whose backs were against a wall. And it does so with humor, compassion, affinity and zero condescension; even if you think you’re pretty well informed about the history here, consider BPM a wake-up call against complacency.

Watch BPM (Beats Per Minute) For Free On Gomovies.