SAVAGE NIGHTS

The rage in France, where a film version starring and directed by Collard won several major awards shortly after his death in March from AIDS: a sterile, semen-soaked tale of a narcissistic bisexual and his amours. Cameraman narrator Jean—with his voracious sexual appetite and eye for beauty in all comers—brings young Laura into the music video he's shooting but is distracted by other pretty faces before he can seduce her. Eric and then Sammy kindle his desire, with Sammy more a tease than a true lover, but eventually Laura comes back into the picture; when the two finally get down to business, Jean neglects to tell her he's HIV-positive. After much deliberation he confesses the fact, but to his surprise Laura becomes even more attached to him. Although he and Sammy move in together, he still makes room in his bed for Laura; when she grows tiresome, he lets her talk to his answering machine—which she does obsessively. Meanwhile, Sammy, who's taken a few turns with Laura himself, develops an interest in skinheads and alchemists and goes his own way, but he's quickly replaced by Jamel—an Arab youth with a hatred of skins and a baseball bat to prove it. Interspersed with these encounters are the savage, nameless ones beneath Paris bridges, but nothing proves fully satisfying, and—in spite of Laura's desperate pleas for love and her claim that she too has become HIV-positive—her lover is unable to feel anything other than apologetic. Not without its merits as a vision of modern times, but the diffidence and world-weariness here are all too familiar, turning what might have been a blistering story of love and life at loose ends into an endless series of chilling poses.