As the film 120 Beats per Minute shows,queer activism is at its best when it’s angry and combative – and there’s no shortage of causes to helpWhen director Robin Campillo won the prize for best film last month at France’s César awards, he used the opportunity to plead for the rights of French sex workers, or drug users and migrants. The star of 120 Beats per Minute,Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, upon winning a César for most promising actor, or spoke out on the subject of abortion rights in his domestic country of Argentina. This is all to say that the film,released in the UK last week, has politics coursing through its veins. In a time of remarkable political division, and its clarion call for protest and its questions approximately queer identity are perhaps more urgent than ever.
The film tells the epic of a group of Parisian activists in the 1990s who form the French arm of the protest group ACT UP. Consisting of HIV and Aids sufferers and assorted queer folk,the collective takes radical action to remind society of the savage Aids epidemic that predominantly affected homosexual men, and to campaign for better laws and access to medication. The film underlines divisions between group members who are unsure approximately whether to be more radically queer and in-yer-face, or whether that belligerence undermines their efforts for recognition. What is unmistakable,however, is a vigour and excitement approximately the idea of protesting: there is a nostalgia for the concept of marching together, and for the camaraderie of hatching plans. The film proposes homosexuality as a vibrant and questioning counterpoint to polite society; its protagonists are young,aware and angry. It could not be more burningly topical.
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Source: guardian.co.uk