‘BPM’ re-creates ACT UP in Paris
Writer-director Robin Campillo was in a bar with the crew of his second feature “Eastern Boys” (2013) when he made what he calls “a bad joke.” It had been a grueling day of shooting and Campillo groused to Hugues Charbonneau that the producer owed him, to which Charbonneau replied that he owed the director nothing.
“I said, ‘You owe me big, because I dressed up your boyfriend after he died,’ ” Campillo recalls during a chat at the Toronto International Film Festival where “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” the eventual result of their barroom conversation, screened. “It was just like a joke, because it is a running gag between us, but the people around us were terrified. Hugues and I started talking about what happened 25 years ago in our lives, when we were in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).
“I knew I wanted to make a film about that time, but I was delaying all the time, because I was afraid of doing it. So, I started out like this, because of a bad joke.”
“BPM (Beats Per Minute),” the winner of three awards at the Cannes Film Festival and France’s entry in the 2018 best foreign language film Oscar race, is at once a re-creation of ACT UP Paris as it was in the early 1990s — depicting contentious inner debates, provocative public actions, fierce advocacy of AIDS patients and angry criticism of the pharmaceutical industry and the French government — and a love story between HIV-negative Nathan (Arnaud Valois) and HIV-positive Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart).
Campillo joined ACT UP Paris in the early 1990s after spending a decade struggling alone with the ramifications of being a young gay man during the early years of the AIDS pandemic. When the disease blew up in the press in 1983, the Morocco-born French filmmaker, now 55, had just started studying film. Cinema should have obsessed him; instead, his career would not begin in earnest until the late 1990s. Fear gripped him.
“What was interesting in the story for me, from my own experience, is after 10 years of being alone, we got together, and it was magical, the energy, because it was very positive,” Campillo says. “At that moment in the epidemic, that was critical.
“I wanted the spectator to live the experience I lived then when I came to this group,” he adds. “It was like jumping in a swimming pool, because you were in this large debate for like four hours every week and, after that, we went to the restaurant, still talking about it.”
At 33, “BPM” star Valois wasn’t even born when the AIDS pandemic started, although he does retain an early memory of seeing ACT UP in the news when he was 9. The image of the pink condom the group placed on the obelisk at Paris’ Place de la Concorde made an impression. That came back to him as he read Campillo and Philippe Mangeot’s script.
“Act Up was very good at spectacle in the French media,” Valois says. “But I didn’t really know what they were doing, how they were doing it, or why, so I discovered it as I was reading the script.”
For Campillo, the way he was telling his story and the way he cast it — Valois remembers reading for three roles and coming in every week for two hours of intense work for 3½ months before he was actually cast — reflects his desire to re-create ACT UP.
“It was like everybody is moving together. It’s like an organism,” says Campillo. “I thought when we were in ACT UP that we were one body with different organs — the heart, the liver. What happened when someone important to the group was dying, it was very hard, because it was like we lost our heart. So it was very important to film the group like a body.”
Campillo said he hopes “BPM” will reignite discussion about HIV and AIDS, pointing out that although new treatments have helped millions of people, millions of people don’t have access to those drugs and millions don’t even know they are HIV positive. Valois is sure his director has succeeded.
“I’m receiving a lot of messages on Instagram and Facebook from really young boys and young girls,” the actor says. “They are discovering the past. They didn’t know, and they really want to be involved now in prevention. The movie is provoking this.”