A scream, a death and 4 awards: in 1992 Savage Nights shook up french cinema.
Savage Nights brings you into the life of a french man called Jean, he’s 30 years old, bisexual, HIV-positive, traveling, he’s a film director living in Paris, and the story settles in 1986. Jean is about to have his life turned upside down by two encounters, one with Laura, a 17-year-old aspiring actress, and the other one is with Samy, a young man in search of identity and adrenalin.
The two love stories eventually collide violently in a love triangle that cannot take shape. Laura falls madly in love with Jean, her first love, and she wants something absolute, unconditional from it. For his part, Jean just wants to enjoy life, to get high with with it, in order to forget about AIDS, which is somehow like a diffuse element of the background, and impossible to remove.
The relationship of Jean and Laura becomes passionate, destructive, because Laura is possessive with Jean, she wants everything from it, and from him. After about the third of the film, Jean announces his HIV+ status to Laura. The young woman becomes interacting with Jean in a repulsion-attraction mode. Laura, like Jean, believes that love triumphs over everything, including illness, but not over another love. The growing relationship between Jean and Samy is a greater threat to her. Especially since Samy, who seems to be a heterosexual guy in a couple with Marianne, also ends up settling down with Jean.
The story explores the emotional triangle of its characters, torn between their desires and their fears. The secondary characters have a real importance in the story, they allow to dezoom and de-passionate the vision of the film, and to confront the main characters with a reality close to the spectators, such as Laura with her mother.
AIDS is not just a dramatic feature, it’s a life luggage as we say in french, not quite like any other for Jean. Collard chooses to show a character who refuses to be kind of framed in illness, who continues to love, desire, mistake sometimes, suffer, and above all, smile at life. The film does not hide risks, or fears, but it refuses to reduce its characters to their status as HIV-positive. AIDS is becoming a low-key but frightening threat, but also a driving force of the urgency to live. The film is first and foremost a vector of positivity, of life, at the heart of an epidemic.
1986 is the year when was named HIV the virus causing AIDS, the year AZT was released in France, (an anti-cancer medication invented in the 60s). 1986 is also one year after the arrival of the first tests in Europe, and two years after the creation of the first french association against AIDS called AIDES. So this was a year of hope, but the number of people dying from AIDS was increasing exponentially in France [1],
and television made alarming announcements.
The most visible manifestation caused by AIDS, this infection discovered by Kaposi, which takes advantage of the collapsing immune system to develop into tumors, on the skin but not only, and that could quickly turn into sarcomas (cancers), which made this infection a sign of fast and fatal progression of AIDS for infected patients. Cyril Collard shows for real in the film, the laser treatment that is done on a tumor on his arm. Collard was hospitalized several times, in the greatest secret, during the shooting, he suspected that this film would be his one and only feature film. In 1992, the statistics were overwhelming : the number of cases of sick persons had risen to almost 2500 per year [2].
However, Savage Nights is not at all a film about AIDS, it is above all, a film about love.
In 1987, Cyril Collard published a novel, very inspired by his life, Condamnés amour (Condemned (to) love). He also created a short film of his book, a visual promotion that is like a mockup of the future Nuits Fauves.
Short with time, Cyril Collard tries to condense into a single scenario the defining experiences of a lifetime, which can range from taking drugs, excess night, speed, cruising sex outdoor at night. And also the lights of the city, those of Morocco, the South American sun. And then friendship, love of men, love of women. Women are very important in the story, played by actresses who I think are better than the actors, like Corinne Blue, Cyril Collard’s partner was cast in the role of Laura’s mother, or the very moving Claude Winter as Jean’s mother.
The style of the film sometimes takes on the appearance of video clips from the 80s (Collard directed some), it oscillates between a disappearing post-war Paris, and a new Paris of neo-fascists of the skinheads style, in which Samy believes himself to belong.
Collard describes very well the masochistic temptation of the right-wing, far-right-wing gays, seduced by a kind of fantasized phallocracy, in which they would feel protected by a phony brotherhood.
And also Cyril Collard brings to his film another of his talents, as a musician, with his song Là-bas.
From a strictly technical point of view, the film has awkward moments, ellipses lacking logic, but its tone, its sincerity, its strength. It is a moment of exposure, of explosion, of an invisible part of the population. Jean, a bisexual character who is fully out and at ease with what he is, may it shock, or disturb.
Yet more than 2.8M spectators in cinemas, placed the film in 9th position, behind Bodyguard, l’Amant or Basic Instict.
The success of the film was rewarded by 4 César awards : best first film, best film, best editing, 3 awards quickly forgotten or avoided.
Because history has especially retained the César award of the best young hope for the actress Romane Bohringer, who really deserved it, even if she does not really debuted there, in front there was Catherine Deneuve so, well... Romane in the role of Laura remains a milestone of french cinema.
The great strength of the film is also to refuse to enter into a narrative heavy with pathos, Jean being above all a sunny, smiling, living character.
And Jean is so much Cyril Collard, nourishing his own life experiences of HIV and bisexuality for his character, in this powerful story. Collard died a few days before the film was awarded with the 1993 César awards.
Cyril Collard brings the first main character bisexual as fully out, in a deep sentimental story, nourished, even if the other characters always refer to him with the word «faggot », which is heard very often, it is clear that bisexuals are always referred to what they are not, being pointed at as shadowy persons.
Jean is in a position of suffering, anger or denial about HIV, and despite the sometimes negative portrayal of him on drugs, bareback sex, his cruising, Jean is also a positive, altruistic, listening man, and deeply in love.
And finally, it is his tender light that remains in our memory.
