Hanging In

IT ISN’T easy to make an honest film about homosexuality and AIDS, two topics that nowadays go almost as much hand in hand as love and marriage used to do. And just as a traditional love story tended to end with wedding bells, in today’s homosexual story the knell of AIDS is, at least distantly, tolling. There are homosexual lifestyles that would not bring a blush to a dowager’s cheek, or make a redneck see red. But once AIDS is addressed, so must be the indiscriminate sexuality that turned it into an epidemic, which, however, does not sit well with the grass-roots audiences on whose frayed greenbacks the movie industry depends. And so we get a bogus film such as Philadelphia, whose good box office smells of moral BO.

Now from France comes Savage Nights, which, without being a masterpiece, is honest, artistic, and disturbing: instead of providing glib answers, it asks difficult questions. It is written, directed, and starred in by Cyril Collard, a writer, musician, photographer, sailing instructor, and occasional actor, who adapted it from his second and last novel. One of the first French public figures to declare themselves HIV-positive at a time when this required real courage, Collard died of AIDS at 35, three days before his film won four Césars (French Oscars), including the one for best picture. The novel was statedly autobiographical; the movie, on which Jacques Fieschi collaborated with Collard, departs from it in small but significant ways: it loses something in breadth, but gains in concentration.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

IT ISN’T easy to make an honest film about homosexuality and AIDS, two topics that nowadays go almost as much hand in hand as love and marriage used to do. And just as a traditional love story tended to end with wedding bells, in today’s homosexual story the knell of AIDS is, at least distantly, tolling. There are homosexual lifestyles that would not bring a blush to a dowager’s cheek, or make a redneck see red. But once AIDS is addressed, so must be the indiscriminate sexuality that turned it into an epidemic, which, however, does not sit well with the grass-roots audiences on whose frayed greenbacks the movie industry depends. And so we get a bogus film such as Philadelphia, whose good box office smells of moral BO.

Now from France comes Savage Nights, which, without being a masterpiece, is honest, artistic, and disturbing: instead of providing glib answers, it asks difficult questions. It is written, directed, and starred in by Cyril Collard, a writer, musician, photographer, sailing instructor, and occasional actor, who adapted it from his second and last novel. One of the first French public figures to declare themselves HIV-positive at a time when this required real courage, Collard died of AIDS at 35, three days before his film won four Césars (French Oscars), including the one for best picture. The novel was statedly autobiographical; the movie, on which Jacques Fieschi collaborated with Collard, departs from it in small but significant ways: it loses something in breadth, but gains in concentration.