C'Est La Mort

By RICHARD CORLISS

Paris and Philadelphia were never exactly sister cities, except maybe to Benjamin Franklin. In current movie terms, and when the incendiary issue of AIDS is raised, the towns couldn't be further apart. The hit film Philadelphia treats its subject gingerly, making its hero a saint and a near monogamist. Cyril Collard's French film Savage Nights is defiantly incorrect, even reckless, in its political agenda. Its hero is a fellow who is HIV positive but continues to have unprotected sex. C'est la vie. C'est la mort. No big difference.

Writer-director Collard plays Jean, a bisexual filmmaker determined to keep searching for truth -- and partying hard -- in the face of death. He * vacillates between Samy (Carlos Lopez), a rough-trade Spaniard, and Laura (Romane Bohringer, recently seen illuminating The Accompanist), a would-be actress. Jean wants to have safe sex with Laura, but she will let no condom come between them. Ever the gent, Jean obliges.

One would like to embrace Savage Nights. Its dour attitude and grungy visual style are an antidote to Hollywood's reductive take on AIDS stories. Collard, who died of aids last year, a few days before his film was awarded a Cesar (France's Oscar) for Best Picture, comes across as a director showing real skill with his young cast, and as a skulkily seductive actor.

But the movie finally confounds everyone's best intentions, including the audience's. It is both sensational and sentimentalized. It ricochets from one lurid fresco to another. O.K., these days narrative coherence is for wimps. But since Savage Nights staggers along at two hours plus, it is less an inside tour of the lower depths than a life sentence down there. Even art-house moviegoers sympathetic to Collard's aims may decide they'd rather be in Philadelphia. -- R.C.