It has been a landmark year for LGBT cinema. From Moonlight’s Oscar victory to the triumphant Sundance premieres of gay romances God’s Own Country and Call Me By Your Name; from the transgender breakthrough of Chile’s A Fantastic Woman to the mainstream politicking of Battle of the Sexes, we’re seeing a wider-than-ever array of approaches to sexuality on film, no longer confined to the arthouse fringe.
The biggest breakthrough of the lot, however, might be French writer-director Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute), which opens in US cinemas on Friday. Outwardly, Campillo’s sprawling, impassioned reflection on the formative years of Aids activist group Act-Up Paris doesn’t appear especially subversive. Meshing fact and fiction with formal grace, conscientious historical detail and a fascination with the to and fro of human debate – it’s not hard to tell that Campillo co-wrote Laurent Cantet’s thrillingly argument-driven The Class – it’s an A-grade prestige film that has met with acceptance and acclaim. Pedro Almodóvar’s jury handed it the Grand Prix award at Cannes, while France has selected it as their entry in this year’s foreign-language Oscar race, where it’s the strong favourite to win.
What’s new, you ask? We’ve seen Aids dramas before: they’ve been winning prizes since Tom Hanks accepted an Oscar in lachrymose fashion for Philadelphia in 1994. BPM, however, has about as much in common with Philadelphia as The Danish Girl does with Hedwig and the Angry Inch: Campillo’s film isn’t just a gay film, but an explicitly, ebulliently queer one, shot through not just with righteous political anger and equal-opportunity compassion, but joyous, unabashed carnality.
BPM’s multiple frank sex scenes aren’t there for illustration or titillation. Look to a scene late in the film, shared by the passionate lovers at the film’s centre in the seemingly sexless environs of a hospital ward: never has the simple act of an illicit handjob been portrayed on screen as such an intense act of mutual caring and desire.
This is not radical in itself, of course: there exist far wilder sights and statements in the annals of queer cinema than anything in BPM. Yet until now, the Venn diagram of queer films and films expressly about LGBT history has been one of minimal overlap: previous films about the Aids epidemic and the advocacy movements it spawned have been largely tidy, tasteful affairs, geared more towards educating viewers unaffected by the disease than energising and emboldening those caught in its grip.
Take Philadelphia and fellow Oscar-winner Dallas Buyers Club, starring Matthew McConaughey in an allegedly “straightwashed” turn as rodeo cowboy turned Big Pharma-busting Aids activist Ron Woodroof: both are kind-hearted, well-acted films with sanitised protagonists that offer little sense of the pulsating, vibrant community behind the growing awareness campaign.
Documentary and independent cinema offered more scope for rigour and exactitude, though rarely with much joy or wit: nearly 30 years on, American cinema has yet to make a more humane, inclusive portrait of the Aids-affected community than Norman Rene’s 1990 indie Longtime Companion. (TV has been more generous, serving up such thoughtful works as Angels in America, And the Band Played On and The Normal Heart – all, however, constrained by the demands of the small screen.)
This is not a problem unique to the Aids-dedicated chapter of LGBT history on film: caution and conservatism persist in a multitude of real-life narratives that call for queerer treatment. Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk biopic was lively, intelligently researched and immaculately performed by Sean Penn – shame Van Sant, the director of the vividly queer My Own Private Idaho, felt the need to tiptoe around the horny realities of its subject’s sex life, even leaving a San Francisco bathhouse scene on the cutting-room floor.
This year, Tom of Finland promised viewers a kinky view into the life and inspiration of history’s most famous gay erotic artist, only to get oddly coy about what lies beneath the leather. And in Battle of the Sexes, Billie Jean King’s lesbian awakening was about little more than a haircut, for all the frisson of sexuality we’re permitted to observe between Emma Stone and Andrea Riseborough; it’s left to Alan Cumming, the film’s palatably camp mascot of all things gay, to deliver a wholesome rallying cry for change in the final minutes.
And those films have been mostly warmly received: let us draw a veil over the decorous, pot pourri-scented horrors of Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, in which pioneering transgender woman Lili Elbe’s entire reconceptualization of her identity apparently comes down to a single encounter with expensive silk stockings. Even that, however, didn’t run into as much trouble as Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall, a film more clueless than hateful, but one whose inaccurate fictionalisation of a defining moment in LGBT liberation history – that the riots were kicked off by a cute, white, straight-acting farm lad – could hardly have seemed more dated in 2015.
Such films, whatever their merits, have their uses as teaching tools for less enlightened or adventurous viewers – who may come an inch closer to sympathising with the transgender experience by seeing that nice Eddie Redmayne in a dress, or whose stance against gay love may have been softened slightly by Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics and Tom Hanks’s tears. But as LGBT cinema expands and flourishes, there’s no reason why this has to be the dominant cinematic approach.
BPM is an absorbing and moving film by any measure, but it’s as a specifically queer reclamation of much-tilled factual territory that it feels most bracing and vital. Compare it to recent British crowd-pleaser Pride, a story that in another universe – or at least a very different UK film industry – could have been told in similar terms to BPM. A perfectly charming portrayal of the unlikely collaboration between London gay activists and a Welsh mining community felled by the 1984 strike, it shares with Campillo’s film an interest in community and intersectionality at a fragile point in the gay rights movement, yet they have little in common beyond that.
Only by a whisker does Pride avoid Richard Curtis territory in its neutered portrayal of its oppressed community, which ends on the very brink of the crisis taken up by BPM; it’s a film a gay man could comfortably show to his blinkered grandmother, safe in the knowledge she’d leave the film sympathetic to his identity, but none the wiser as to how he really lives and loves.
You might show her BPM too, of course: no two grandmothers are made alike, after all. Straight viewers are by no means shut out of Campillo’s film, but invited to consider and appreciate the difference of other people’s experience and history, from the way they fight to the way they fuck. After a dominant run of gay dramas that have made compromises in the name of perceived alikeness, BPM feels at once universally empathetic and jubilantly other.
- BPM is released in US cinemas on 20 October and in the UK at a later date
