BPM (Beats Per Minute)
Director: Robin Campillo
Year Released: 2017
Rating: 1.5
A frenzied, panicked group of French AIDS activists (including Arnaud Valois, Adèle Haenel and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), many of them HIV+, storm the offices of "Melton Pharmaceuticals" to demand to know how much progress is being made on treatment options for their terminal condition. Campillo's lovely dance sequences are dreamy and abstract (in act one, there's a mesmerizing sequence set to "Premier Club" by Arnaud Rebotini), but those go directly against the bulk of the movie's "message" ... which is slammed home with the force of a battering ram (we get it, we know, people can be ignorant and homophobic): it brings to mind the 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague ... only fictionalized and dragged out to the point where it's pathetically begging for your empathy. People may knock Big Pharma, and most times justifiably so, but Gilead Sciences got this covered ... nowadays.
