clotblaster Review of Savage Nights

Savage Nights (1992)

Powerful and passionate film about a beautiful human being.

[10/10 · 18 February 2006]

The movie is a classical tragedy. The star, writer, director Cyril Collard has Aids and knows he is dying when making the film. He storms and rages against the forces of negativity and affirms life in ways that seem obscene to many, but really focus on the basics of life, love and the willingness to actually live your life, even knowing that you are about to die. To quote Dylan Thomas, "He rages against the dying of the night." This is not a gloomy film, except for the immense talent that Collard has in a number of areas, not the least writing and directing. The tragedy is that his libertine life of reckless homosexuality killed him (and many others). Unlike Philadelphia, an artifice of politically correct, maudlin nonsense, this film has Aids sometimes right in your face and sometimes in the background, but it is always there. Hedonism killed many and still does in the Aids epidemic and in the U.S.A., this film would attract few positive reviews and almost no distribution because Collard refuses to play the victim game. Over 80% of Aids deaths have been caused by homosexual behavior. In the film Collard can't control his impulses and because of Aids he wants to squeeze as much out of life as he can. The love story with Laura, beautifully played by Romane Bohringer, is tragic in and of itself, but their love is fatally compromised by his disease. Collard desperately wanted to live his life with Aids and not have Aids run his life. Unfortunately, that is impossible, although he gives it a mighty effort to free himself from thoughts of death, which never really leave him. He continues to have grimy homosexual encounters, supposedly not involving dangerous sex (at least in the film); my surmise is that in real life he lived dangerously right up to the end. When he has sex with Laura the first time, he doesn't use a condom and doesn't tell her he has Aids--a classic kind of denial, an attempt to conquer the disease through action , which is selfish. Many homosexuals will see this film, which other scenes do not really show them in a positive light, as a film to suppress. Reckless behavior has volcanoed in the last few years, but gets no publicity because of the left-wing press who refuses to see Aids victims as anything but victims, who didn't really cause their disease. Collard's film slaps the faces of hypocrisy and lying about Aids again and again in this film. It is a testimony to his will to live and to make a film that doesn't cover up the reality of how Aids is spread and how little impulse control many gays have. Drugs will not stop Aids deaths, safe sex and sometimes no sex will. Also, and very important, Collard wants to show that the heterosexual relationship with a loving woman is the way to live your life, but for him his refusal to control his impulses and perhaps his genetic inability to control them (though that is difficult to infer), keeps him from what would have saved him. Hedonism is not spat on in this movie, but its terrible results in many cases are exemplified in the tragic death of such a talented and lovely man.