France’s Oscar contender for best foreign language film, BPM, fucked me up for days after I saw it. But I’m glad I did—it’s a movie about AIDS activism that avoids many of the tropes that usually appear in depictions of HIV and AIDS. In other words, it’s the kind of movie that wouldn’t get made in the United States.
Set in 1990s Paris and focused on a French activist group modeled on ACT UP (Acte! Oope!), BPM is beautifully shot, with impressionistic and associative editing. Surreal scenes of demonstrations that incorporate fake blood and scattered pills dissolve into dialogue-less, strobing club scenes—which then bleed into shapes that slide into focus as infected immune cells, only to become flowers in the next shot. It’s mesmerizing and abstract, and it adds stylistic cohesion to a film that’s otherwise unstructured.