_Savage Nights_

                   reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs



     "I believe that AIDS is a kind of language, that it has
something to tell us. It brings to the forefront all of the
dysfunctions and aberrations of our society.'' 

     Made shortly before his death of AIDS last year, writer-
director Cyril Collard's observation seems especially desperate
and acute. It also *seems* true. What this movie does best
though, is mess with what you think is "true.'' 

     When he made and starred in _Savage Nights_, Collard was
dying. Everyone knew it then, and everyone knows it now: the fact
of his death is included in the film's marketing, of course (how
could it not be?); the fact of his death grounds the film's anger
and power. Moreover, the fact of his death also drives the film's
most urgent questions: what cultural assumptions and structures
create "truth''? How is such the fiction that we call truth
connected to experience? How is experience translated to
representation? What is the "language'' of AIDS? 

     Such language would seem too much to bear. And at a most
basic level, _Savage Nights_ thematizes excessiveness.
Everything in this movie is too much. Both knowledge and fear of
what's unknown are too much. Jean (Collard) is introduced knowing
his HIV status, knowing that his death is imminent. This is
nearly impossible to bear, as are the connections between Collard
and Jean (an artist-writer-filmmaker in Paris). But these
apparent intersections of life and fiction are immeasurable, too
much to map: Jean is a character, with a script and coherence,
while Collard's experience is almost beyond understanding,
certainly beyond a framework of five acts, rising action with a
climax.

     Jean is passionately committed to living, hard. He begins
without a specific object for his passion. He has two lovers, an
18-year-old girl, Laura (Romane Bohringer), and Samy (Carlos
Lopez), a married man increasingly attracted to dangerous sex and
violence. Laura is middle-class, an aspiring actor who auditions
for Jean. She falls for his dash, his romance, his sadness. She
doesn't find out that he's positive, however, until after they
have unprotected sex. In a scene that has received much critical
and public attention (mostly negative), they fight and then go to
bed: he reaches for the condom and she puts it aside. 

     Laura's anger and pain are framed by her obsession with
Jean, which is also an obsession with the romantic life and
tragic death that he literally embodies. (He gazes into a mirror,
wondering what is growing inside, destroying his beautiful body
from within: the metaphor itself seems immoderate, too close.) 

     Laura's addiction to love (masquerading as sex; she's an
adolescent girl living at home with her mother) mirrors that of
Maria Schneider in _Last Tango in Paris_, and _Savage
Nights_ quotes liberally from Bertolucci, even including a scene
where Laura attacks Jean much like Schneider attacked Brando, and
Schneider herself as one of Jean's ex-lovers: her face-off with
Laura is simultaneously petty and dramatic, exacerbating the
tensions between life that surpasses comprehension and _Last
Tango_'s now-legendary fantasy of excess. 

     The twist (for lack of a better term) in _Savage Nights_
is Jean/Collard's bisexuality. As the sign of this potentially
radical collapse of conventional categories, Samy is charged with
energy and compassion. His background is complex: his Spanish-
speaking family is tightknit (they befriend Jean), his wife is
hurt by his extramarital affairs. Eventually, Samy visits an
underground sex club, tops in an s/m scene, and begins prowling
the streets with a fascist-punk gang, looking for victims. The
connections among his abusive behaviors, desire for pain, and his
relationship with Jean are important; they demonstrate the
overlapping of social dysfunctions and celebrations.

     If bisexuality in this film is premised on a predominantly
heterosexual model (the most compelling, developed relationship
is Laura and Jean's), it also opens a way - or gestures toward a
way - to imagine bisexuality's broader, less confined
possibilities, its multiplicities and frank instabilities. And
this is what _Savage Nights_ does best: it provokes
rethinking of the "truths'' so many people take for granted,
resists traditional categories of identity and morality, insists
on the inadequacy of familiar social contracts. 

     This is a crisis movie. It's important for that reason, for
its analysis of the impossibility and absolute imperative of
intimacy. It's also important because of its apparent flaws, its
occasional resort to melodrama, its ongoing desire for structures
that make sense, its existential heroics. Mostly, it's important
for its inelegance, its lack of answers and "truth'' (despite the
concluding sequence, which appears to grant some fairly regular 
closure). _Savage Nights_ creates a language, imperfect,
raging, and necessary. 



Cynthia Fuchs teaches film/media studies and is coordinator of the
queer studies project at George Mason University.

Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.

This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.