Savage Nights

Highly controversial and troubling but undeniably powerful and impossible to dismiss, this French feature cowritten (with critic Jacques Fieschi) by, directed by, and starring the late Cyril Collard follows the last reckless days and nights of a 30-year-old cinematographer and musician who discovers he is HIV positive but continues to have sex with strangers as well as with his two more regular lovers. Based on Collard’s autobiographical novel Les nuits fauves, Savage Nights won Cesars (the French equivalent of Oscars) for best picture, best first picture, most promising actress (Romane Bohringer), and best editing a few days after the 35-year-old filmmaker died of AIDS in March 1993. These honors can’t simply be written off as sentimental: stylistically and dramatically, this is an accomplished piece of work. If Collard’s driven hero often seems far from admirable–unconsciously misogynistic beneath his apparent bisexual “tolerance,” and, as his masochistic behavior often implies, full of self-loathing–the film seems admirably unpropagandistic in permitting spectators to make up their own minds about him. It also gives full voice to the agony of unrequited adolescent love (Bohringer’s volcanic performance), and, for better and for worse, offers a treatment of AIDS that’s the other side of the moon from Philadelphia–politically incorrect with a vengeance. Read more