Savage Nights. - movie reviews

Commonweal, June 3, 1994 by Richard Alleva

To describe the (presumably) autobiographical hero of Cyril Collard's Savage Nights as bisexual is about as helpful as calling the Grand Canyon deep or Mozart musically inclined. Apart from his work as a photojournalist, Jean lives for quick, furtive sexual collisions, and he, s dying of them, too. His HIV diagnosis has accelerated his promiscuity, and it seems to have accelerated the tempo of this movie. Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves) is very sad, indeed, but it must be the speediest sad movie ever made. It hurtles toward its conclusion as precipitously as the hero races to his own extinction. Yet the hero doesn't die. And, as we shall see, his story doesn't really end.

It doesn't develop much, either. How could it? Jean is trapped in the particularly vicious circle dictated by his temperament. He can,t come to grips with the fact of his own mortality. The thought of his perhaps imminent demise plunges him into a state of vertigo which he can quell only by pressing someone, s flesh against his own. But his realization that he may be infecting others as well as consuming his own dwindling energies pushes Jean further into panic. And so he abases himself again and again under the bridges and in the sidestreets of Paris with riffraff of the worst sort.

From two people he seeks more than sex: the seventeen-year-old Laura, a born self-immolator on the pyre of passion, and Samy, a bit of rough trade not without heart but so short on brains and self-esteem that he has to hook up with neo-Nazis in order to prove his masculinity to himself. Jean ricochets between these two, thereby creating brawls, near-insanity in Laura, and heartbreak all around.

Collard tries to probe his protagonist, s nature with a few colloquys between Jean and his parents, between Jean and friends, former lovers, etc., but these dialogues are no more convincing than similar heart-to-hearts in made-for-TV movies. On the whole, though, Savage Nights does grip because of two elements.

First, the editing. Collard revives the jump cutting of Godard, s Breathless and the device has even more utility here than in that classic. At one point, Samy and Laura are verbally assailing each other and their argument seems to be coming to a boil. Then, cut: he is giving her a massage, and the rivals are now so friendly that they come close to making love. In another scene, Jean is calming Laura after a spat and she is subsiding into his arms. Then, cut: she has flung him off and is more sulphurous than ever. What got her going this time? We don't know and we don't have to know. The editing makes us share the emotional discontinuity of these young people, their inability even to sustain moods, much less relationships. Also, these little skips forward in time convey Jean's feeling of racing to his death.

Second, the acting of Romane Bohringer as Laura. Collard as Jean and Carlos Lopez as Samy are better than okay, but Bohringer is spectacular. Misused lovers often turn into monomaniacs and monomaniacs can be boring in life and art, but this actress knows how to render the music of fury and so keeps us watching and listening. In Racine's Phaedra the love-possessed heroine speaks of Venus clawing down her victims. There are moments in this movie when Romane Bohringer lets us see the talons sink in.

I have said that the movie doesn't really end, but Collard does try for a satisfactory conclusion. He wants his hero to attain transcendence of his agony and so, in the last fifteen minutes, the affairs with Samy and Laura both finished, Jean crosses an ocean and communes with nature. On the soundtrack he tells us that he now feels at one with the world and therefore no longer in a panic about leaving it. I couldn't buy it. Those handsome shots of harbors and canyons have the beauty of a well-made travelogue, not the power of spiritual release.

As good as so much of it is, Savage Nights feels, finally, as incomplete as the life of Cyril Collard, who died of AIDS hours before his first and only film received the Cesar (French equivalent of the Oscar) as best movie of 1992.