The Cineskinny 2018 Issue 2

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N0 3 | 25 FEB – 4 MAR

Mon 26 Feb, GFT, 7.45pm | Tue 27 Feb, GFT, 1pm

Acting Out Robin Campillo channels his own memories of being part of AIDS activism collective ACT UP in the early 90s for 120 BPM, a deeply authentic story following the lives of the men involved in the movement

W

hen Robin Campillo collected the Grand Prix at Cannes last May for 120 BPM, it marked the end of a very long road for the director. In 1992, at the age of 30, Campillo joined the AIDS activism collective ACT UP-Paris, and he spent much of the subsequent decades thinking about the best way to bring his experiences to the screen. “I think I did

Interview: Philip Concannon this film to close a door on my youth and also a door in cinema, to do something else,” the very engaging and loquacious director tells The Skinny. “I have this feeling that I had finished a phase of my life. Maybe I won’t have anything to do now – I hope I have some new ideas! But I had this feeling that I had to do this film, and for 25 years I was trying to.”

120 BPM completely immerses us in the world of ACT UP, placing us alongside these young activists and allowing us to experience the energy and intensity of their protests and the heated debates at their meetings. We see them storming the entrance at a pharmaceutical company and hurling bags of fake blood at the walls, or scattering ashes over the food at

a lavish banquet. Campillo has described 120 BPM as a “river film,” ebbing and flowing as it moves between various characters and ideas, building an accumulative emotional force, and one of the film’s most potent images is an aerial shot of the Seine turned blood red. This is a film about a group of marginalised people who had to do whatever it took to shake the establishment and make their voices heard.

“ACT UP exists because we didn’t exist for the first ten years of the epidemic,” Campillo says, and he cites Tod Browning’s Freaks as an influence as he discusses the group’s often extreme provocations. “If you are afraid of us because of the disease, we are going to frighten you; if you are not OK with gays, continues…

>> we are going to become the evil fags. That was something we accepted, to not be lovable.”

And yet, it’s easy for the audience to fall in love with this ensemble, particularly the two leads, Nathan (Arnaud Valois) and Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart). Campillo has given 120 BPM a loose narrative shape, but the relationship between these two young men is the emotional spine of the movie.

Nathan is both the director’s surrogate and the point of connection for the audience; a newcomer to ACT UP who helps us navigate this world. He quickly falls for the passionate and charismatic Sean, who contracted HIV when he was a teenager and knows that his rapidly diminishing T-cell count means he doesn’t have much time left. Their relationship is tender and moving, but Campillo is keen to avoid talking about his film in the clichéd terms of a standard cinematic romance.

“People are talking about this as a beautiful love story and I think... hmm... I mean, love story?” he ponders. “I can accept the expression if we agree on the fact that the most important word is ‘story,’ because ‘love’…I don’t know what it is. We had a lot of sex in this group and in our lives, but you had couples that just existed for five or six months, because one of them was dying. It was very weird.

Nathan and Sean, they are not together for ten years, they just have a few months, or one year tops.

I wanted to talk about that, the fact that you have this quick intimacy, which is very strong.”

That intimacy is explored through sex scenes that are notable not only for their sensuality and frankness, but for the fact that they are integral to the film’s structure and to our understanding of these characters. “What I’m interested in when I do this kind of scene is what is beneath the scene,” Campillo says. “I don’t like a film when you see a sex scene and it’s just a sex scene; people don’t talk, they just have

sex and they do amazing things that you would never do in your life. For me that doesn’t exist.

“All of the things that are a little bit swept under the carpet in other films are fiercely important for me. When you have sex, it happens that it’s a little bit too quick and just one of them is having an orgasm and the other is not, so you start talking about your life, and I love to film this. The fact that they have sex, and then they stop and start talking, and then they start to have sex again, and then you have the ghost of the one he had sex with years ago… I love to shoot this kind of intimate scene. This scene is like a continent by itself, it is such a big landscape.”

“ All of the things that are a little bit swept under the carpet in other films are fiercely important for me” Robin Campillo The ghost Campillo mentions is the memory of the man who infected Sean with AIDS – his first sexual experience – and the degradation of Sean’s condition throughout the course of the film is devastating to watch. Sean is such a vibrant presence when he first appears in 120 BPM, electrifying every scene, but we gradually see that vitality and spirit drain out of him as his disease takes hold, and Campillo put his faith in Biscayart’s revelatory performance to chart this character’s decline rather than showing it through external signifiers, such as lesions or extreme weight loss.

“I didn’t want to see someone with a lot of stigmata, I just wanted to see someone playing less and less and less,” he says. “Nahuel is obviously a very baroque actor and we see that Sean is very theatrical and has a little bit of a theatrical distance from his disease, but when he gets really ill and goes to the hospital, I told the actor, ‘At this moment you stop playing. It’s over.’ For me, that was the most melancholy thing in the film. He has no distance anymore with the disease, and this distance is important when you want to have a political struggle.

It cannot be political anymore if you are caught in the intimacy of your disease.”

The intersection of the personal and the political is where 120 BPM is at its most riveting and exhilarating. Campillo’s film might be evoking a particular time and place, but as a film about what it means to fight for a cause when your life is on the line, and how messy and difficult political activism can be, it should also resonate in our current era of widespread protest and resistance. During our conversation, Campillo notes that his young cast had little to no knowledge of these events in his screenplay; did he think about younger viewers watching the film and how they might relate to its activism?

“No, I was really making the film in a very selfish way, but I knew of these movements,” he says. “I’ve said in a few interviews that these groups – like we have Les Indigènes de la République in France – I don’t always agree with them on a lot of points, but they exist. You have to stay a little bit more open to what is happening now, because if these groups are very radical it’s because there is a lot to fight against.

I have this feeling that some people think they are very dodgy, but it was exactly the same thing with ACT UP, so when people are very welcoming to the film today we have to think and remember that we were not so welcome 25 years ago.”

R E VIE WS How to Talk to Girls at Parties  Director: John Cameron Mitchell Starring: Elle Fanning, Alex Sharp, Nicole Kidman, Ruth Wilson

“ Its punk sensibility is about as authentic as the Disneyland Castle”

John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short story concerning cannibalistic aliens is a perplexing film, but not a terribly interesting one. Despite a cast that includes the triple-whammy of Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning and Ruth Wilson, and a director capable of creating a film as sublimely subversive as Hedwig and the Angry Itch, the result doesn’t add up to much, coming across like an extended episode of a BBC kids’ show from the early 90s with a few lewd jokes thrown in.

Wed 28 Feb, Cineworld, 8.30pm Thu 1 Mar, Cineworld, 1pm

It’s a story of young love in 1970s Croydon, where a teenage punk (Sharp) falls in with a band of travelling performance artists. Travellers they are – intergalactic ones that hop across the galaxy in their humanoid forms gaining new experiences and eating their own offspring before vanishing back into the ether.

Tonally, Cameron Mitchell’s film is all over the place. Its punk sensibility is about as authentic as the Disneyland Castle, while the humour is at Inbetweeners level, with jokes about ‘anal cherries’ and homosexual awakenings. Nicole Kidman, sporting an outlandish cockney accent and channeling Vivienne Westwood, is fun though. [Joseph Walsh]

Keep up-to-date with our daily online GFF coverage over at facebook.com/TheSkinnyMag, @theskinnymag and @skinnyfilm

Tue 27 Feb, GFT, 8.40pm | Wed 28 Feb, GFT, 3.50pm

“ When Custody explodes into rages, it’s likely your stomach will clench up with anxiety” Custody 

Director: Xavier Legrand Starring: Thomas Gioria, Léa Drucker, Denis Ménochet, Mathilde Auneveux, Jean-Marie Winling

The opening of Xavier Legrand’s debut feature is a brief and rapid-fire custody hearing, with the judge asking questions like “Which of you is the bigger liar?”

It’s a bracing question that leads us to study the characters very carefully in the slower, more static consequent scenes, as Léa Drucker and Denis Ménochet’s characters tussle for time with their two kids, particularly the pre-teen boy played by newcomer Thomas Gloria. He’s the

A Fantastic Woman 

most vulnerable and stuck in the middle, while the teenage daughter, played by Mathilde Auneveux, can feel herself on the verge of adulthood, ready to escape into a destiny of her own making.

“We have an hour, because I picked you up an hour late,” says Ménochet in one of the visits, tipping us off to the kind of petty score-keeping that dominates this bitter fight. He claims to want to know where his kids are living, but when

he’s with the boy, he doesn’t seem to show much interest in him. Legrand generates an astonishing amount of tension in these scenes, holding tight on the child’s discomfort, and when Custody explodes into rages, it’s likely your stomach will clench up with anxiety.

It’s an effective film, then, but one that seems to promise an investigation into the complexities of emotional violence, and decides to go in a different direction.

Rather than investigate the tangle of how a marriage broke down and how worst selves can get the better of a relationship, the story unfolds as a onesided reveal of one impulsive partner’s abusiveness – a valid and recognisable tale, but one whose stalking rampages end up feeling more like a manipulative horror-thriller than the drama of shattered emotion that was hinted at in the beginning. [Ian Mantgani]

Sun 25 Feb, GFT, 8.40pm Mon 26 Feb, GFT, 1.15pm

Gnecco, Aline Küppenheim, Amparo Noguera

Following 2013’s crowd-pleasing Gloria, Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman is another portrait of an unconventional female protagonist defying the expectations of those around her and societal norms.

Marina (Vega) is deeply in love with Orlando (Reyes), a businessman 20 years her senior, but when he suddenly dies she is ostracised by Orlando’s family, and denied the opportunity to even attend his funeral.

The issue is that Marina is transgender, and Lelio’s film follows her fight for her

love to be recognised as legitimate in the face of prejudice and hostility.

The director’s inclusion of stylised fantasy sequences are sometimes too on-the-nose (see Marina leaning into an overpowering wind, or facing her own image as a mirror is carried past), and the collection of one-dimensional homophobes and bullies that she comes up against risks making the drama too didactic. Fortunately, Lelio has a secret weapon in Daniela Vega, whose starmaking performance invests the film with emotional honesty and gives us a heroine worth rooting for. She really is fantastic.

[Philip Concannon]

“Daniela Vega really is fantastic”

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Illustration: Raj Dhunna

Director: Sebastián Lelio Starring: Daniela Vega, Francisco Reyes, Luis

TOP FIVE

week two Margaret Tait Award 26 Feb, GFT, 6.15pm Always a GFF highlight, last year’s Margaret Tait winner Sarah Forrest presents her mint fresh video piece.

“We can’t wait to see what this filmmaker does next” Pin Cushion 

Mon 26 Feb, GFT, 6pm Tue 27 Feb, GFT, 4pm

Director: Deborah Haywood Starring: Joanna Scanlan, Lily Newmark, Sacha Cordy-Nice

Deborah Haywood’s debut centres on a mother, Lyn (Scanlan), and her daughter, Iona (an otherworldly Newmark), who move into a small English town. The relationship between mother and daughter is unusual. They exist in a too-close-tobe-comfortable proximity to one another: they share one bed and, seemingly, one

Faces Places 

School Disco: Gregory’s Girl v Clueless 28 Feb, SWG3, 6.30pm Two great high school movies play simultaneously followed by a school disco; choose your preferred tribe and then party to hits from both films’ respective eras.

life. When Iona begins her new school and starts to gain independence, moving beyond her mother’s control, the relationship between the women is stretched to its limits – and then it snaps.

Pin Cushion is visually overwhelming.

Described by Haywood as a “fairytale,” the film, like Lyn and Iona’s house, is vivid, full of colour and overstuffed. It’s a deliberate decision used to create a sense of claustrophobia that reflects

Iona’s higgledy-piggledy emotions, although, perhaps at times, less would have been more.

Despite its dreamlike qualities, as the film progresses, both Pin Cushion and Haywood show their teeth. Bullying, sexuality, ostracisation, and the social other are themes which Pin Cushion explores to an unnerving and violent end.

We can’t wait to see what this filmmaker does next. [Katie Goh]

Sun 25 Feb, Cineworld, 6.15pm | Mon 26 Feb, Cineworld, 1pm

The Unfilmables 28 Feb, Saint Luke’s, 7pm This curious concept sees genius composer Mica Levi and electro pioneers Wrangler imagine scores to films that were never actually made.

Run Lola Run 3 Mar, The Art School, 4pm This breakneck tryptic shows us three versions of a flamehaired woman’s against-theclock journey across Berlin to save her boyfriend’s skin.

Director: Agnès Varda, JR

Orphans 4 Mar, GFT, 4pm Peter Mullan’s debut feature, a wildly expressionistic and absurdly comic drama, gets a most welcome 20th anniversary revival.

Starring: Agnès Varda, JR

We would follow Agnès Varda anywhere, but tagging along with the octogenarian filmmaker on a breezy journey across rural France for this whimsical documentary proves particularly rewarding. She’s joined on the trip by JR, a 33-year-old photographer with more than a passing resemblance to Varda’s old mucker Godard, thanks mainly to a pair of sunglasses that never leave his face. The shades mean JR’s view on the world is tinted, while Varda’s own eyes are starting to falter; her filmmaking vision, however, remains pin-sharp and vibrant.

Travelling in JR’s truck-cum-giant camera, the pair skip from town-totown taking huge-scale photographs of

“ Varda’s eyes are starting to falter, but her filmmaking vision remains pin-sharp and vibrant”

Produced by The Skinny magazine in association with the Glasgow Film Festival: Editor-in-Chief Rosamund West

ordinary people, from a trio of dockers’ wives to the last resident of a row of miners’ cottages due for demolition. These huge images are then fly-posted on to local buildings, turning their subjects into icons. Like many of Varda’s docs (The

Gleaners and I, The Beaches of Agnès), Faces Places is also about another icon: Varda herself. She may be barely five feet in her cotton socks, but this moving study of community and memory reminds us she’s a colossus too. [Jamie Dunn]

Editor

Jamie Dunn

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Silvia Razakova

Picture Editor

Sarah Donley

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Peter Simpson

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Lucy Kirk

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