If "BPM" had been made in, say, the early 1990s, it would have been an urgent clarion call hard to ignore. But in 2018 one looks to movies about the AIDS epidemic to tell us some things we don't already know, and this film feels strangely anachronistic.
It's not like I'm naive enough to believe that everything about the disease and those who suffer from it is hunky dory now. But medical and cultural progress has come a long way since AIDS first emerged on the grim horizon, and this film feels like a public service message released too late to do any good. I would have been satisfied with a film chronicling the early days of the AIDS activist movement, which this movie promises to be in its opening scenes. But what I didn't need was a prolonged film about one young man dying slowly from the disease. Do I need another movie convincing me that AIDS is a horrible thing to die from?
There was a lot of head scratching when the Academy Award nominations for 2017 were announced and "BPM" wasn't on the list for Best Foreign Language Film. That head scratching was what led me to see it. Now that I have, I don't think the Academy made a misstep in overlooking it.
Grade: B
It's not like I'm naive enough to believe that everything about the disease and those who suffer from it is hunky dory now. But medical and cultural progress has come a long way since AIDS first emerged on the grim horizon, and this film feels like a public service message released too late to do any good. I would have been satisfied with a film chronicling the early days of the AIDS activist movement, which this movie promises to be in its opening scenes. But what I didn't need was a prolonged film about one young man dying slowly from the disease. Do I need another movie convincing me that AIDS is a horrible thing to die from?
There was a lot of head scratching when the Academy Award nominations for 2017 were announced and "BPM" wasn't on the list for Best Foreign Language Film. That head scratching was what led me to see it. Now that I have, I don't think the Academy made a misstep in overlooking it.
Grade: B