This film was a succès de scandale when it was released twenty years ago, and although (in Europe and America) HIV is not the death sentence that it was at the time, the film still packs an emotional wallop. It is the portrait of a completely self-centered man who is willing to put others at risk in search of his own pleasure and self-actualization. Is he a despicable character? Yes. Does that mean the film is automatically bad? No,however...
The film contains too many unfocused scenes of characters lashing out. By the fourth or fifth scene of the young female protagonist screaming on the phone, screaming in the street, screaming at the door of the apartment, it becomes overdetermined. The film tries to tackle too many subjects--sadomasochism, skinheads, internalized homophobia, bisexuality, AIDS and responsibility, teenage love... it ends up something of a hot mess. I gave it six out of ten because I feel that it is worth seeing, because it captures a certain zeitgeist of the pre-antiretroviral moment, but one does feel a bit on watching it today that it has not aged all that well.
The film contains too many unfocused scenes of characters lashing out. By the fourth or fifth scene of the young female protagonist screaming on the phone, screaming in the street, screaming at the door of the apartment, it becomes overdetermined. The film tries to tackle too many subjects--sadomasochism, skinheads, internalized homophobia, bisexuality, AIDS and responsibility, teenage love... it ends up something of a hot mess. I gave it six out of ten because I feel that it is worth seeing, because it captures a certain zeitgeist of the pre-antiretroviral moment, but one does feel a bit on watching it today that it has not aged all that well.