2017 Cannes Critics’ Panel Day 4: Robin Campillo Finds a Cure with BPM (Beats Per Minute)

With not one, but two items in Cannes this year (the other being L’Atelier from Laurent Cantet in the Un Certain Regard section), Robin Campillo technically has won Palme before when he was a scribe on Cantet’s 2008 The Class. He third outing as a filmmaker and first in Cannes as a director, his previous pair showed in Venice with his debut They Came Back (2004) and Eastern Boys in 2013. His latest (which was screened at 8:30 this morning) has garnered plenty of positive talk with some declaring this is officially in the “lead”. 120 Battements par Minute aka BPM (Beats Per Minute) is set in Paris in the early 1990s, and like The Class, much of this is dialogue heavy and uses spaces with more than a dozen players within the sequence. Of course this is so much more than a depiction of events and early activism during the AIDS epidemic, but a personalized take on how it was to life a parallel existence of loving life and seeing it accompanied with an early expiry date.

Check back with us twice daily for the latest grades (Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories and Michel Hazanavicius’ take on Jean Luc Godard (which had an earlier set of screenings this evening) and make sure to click on the grid below for a larger version.