Robin Campillo directs Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Arnaud Valois and Adèle Haenel in this drama following AIDS awareness activists in 1990s Paris.

There’s a telling moment near the end of 120 BPM. A young man has died. Friends, lovers and colleagues from the ACT UP group arrive one by one to the flat. The bereaved mother asks for help with a sofa bed. A fair few of them get involved in folding the creaking contraption. In the face of the unavoidable (death) they find a problem to solve together, and by pushing against the rusty old mechanisms of comfort and complacency they feel like a community achieving something. It is a literal representation of what we have witnessed them do with passion and desperation over a year or two of story. Surprisingly, Campillo’s recreation of the protest’s groups action, stunts and interactions doesn’t come alive most in the slightly idealised raids and riots. Nor in the romances, which (explicit sex aside) often have the innocent enthusiasm of a 90s teen soap like Byker Grove. The strongest moments are the formal and verbal conflict heavy debates between the group’s membership in a sterile lecture hall. An early scene runs us through the points of order and rules of speaking within these intense sessions, indoctrinating us into the cause like curious new members. We meet and feel the outrage of the young people in these sequences, young people whose life expectancies can be measured in their rapidly diminishing T cell counts. As they try to provoke change within the government, awareness within their community and urgency in the pharma corporations you feel complicit with the power of their motivations. It is powerful film, but also a very loose one… focus shifts onto quite a few glimpsed but unexplored stories and there are about eight adequate conclusions in the overlong last act.

7