movie: BPM (120 beats per minute)

BPM is one of the best movies that I have seen in many years.  It's set in France and follows many activities of the group "ACT UP - Paris" in the early 1990s.  Sure, it includes some politics of the time, although the story isn't really about those politics.  They're the setting, not the story.  Sure, it includes some information about the life of people with AIDS at that time, although it omits a lot. Sure, it includes some intense sex scenes between lovers, although it never shows any "naughty bits".

Mainly, though... I think the movie is about a sero-discordant couple, both heavily involved with ACT UP.  And it's amazing.

I've never seen any other AIDS-era film that captured quite what it's like to have a conversation about how one partner in a couple could potentially kill the other, then dive right in to some passionate love.  Or to know someone you care about is sick and dying yet still find them intensely sexually attractive.  The actors did an amazing job capturing all of these scenarios, plus one more familiar strangeness that straight couples don't usually have to experience.  (No major spoilers in this review.)

I have some familiarity with the scenarios, since my longest relationship (quite short in human terms) was with a man with AIDS.  We broke up before Carl got extremely ill, so I only had to visit him in the hospital once and pick up medicines at a pharmacy once because he was too sick to leave the house.  He was rich, so he had all the best medicines at the time.  He lived several more years after we broke up, surviving for a while even after I moved from Texas to Minnesota.  But we had those same encounters as the film, mixing depressing conversation with hot sex, us debating what is safe and not and what the latest scientific studies said about it, avoiding contact when either of us had a particular biological susceptibility, me changing month to month being either more or less paranoid about sex, me agreeing that I was willing to kill him if he was diagnosed with toxoplasmosis (his main fear, an infection that would rob him of his mind).  How someone remains negative in those years also came up as a topic of conversation in the movie: it's maybe a mixture of preparation and luck.  Carl and I had the same conversations about how each partner is responsible for preventing infection.

Safer sex works, condoms save lives, and I never seroconverted.  I stopped even getting tested for HIV years ago, since I stopped interacting with others sexually about a decade ago.   I dated only one more time after Carl, finally giving up on the process altogether (for unrelated reasons).  I dated only in my 20s, I think, not my teens, 30s, or even 40s.  Movies like this, however, make me wonder about that "other life" that other people live, deeply involved in each other's existence.

This movie briefly reignited my anger from that era at the lack of study of sero-discordant couples.  I called one of Carl's experimental clinics, and they could only panic at my suggestion that they draw blood from me regularly and use me as a volunteer for any potential transmission-suppression drugs.  Idiots.  Years later, the "industry" started exactly such studies, although the professionals at first refused to pursue them.

The ACT UP meetings, as depicted in the film, also reminded me a lot of Occupy Minnesota meetings.  Theirs in the film, however, were a lot more focused and productive than ours.  Still, though, passions and emotions and urgency are obvious throughout.  People die as bureaucracy moves slowly.  Supposedly powerless civilians like us have to demand change from our institutions, both public and private.

Oh, and the movie is French with English subtitles, but I forgot all about that feature quite soon.  The movie is long, 140 minutes, but I forgot about that too.  It's a very good film.  It has a limited release, so definitely see at the theater while you have an opportunity.  Expect to hear it named during the Oscars this year for best foreign film consideration.

This movie is a reminder to people conveniently tweeting the #Resistance hashtag that we've had these fights before, with far more urgency, and we (mostly) won.  Keep fighting.  Silence = Death.