Savage Nights.

IT ISN'T easy to make an honest film about homosexuality and AIDS, two topics that nowadays go almost as much hand in hand as love and marriage used to do. And just as a traditional love story tended to end with wedding bells, in today's homosexual story the knell of AiDS is, at least distantly, tolling. There are homosexual lifestyles that would not bring a blush to a dowager's cheek, or make a redneck see red. But once AIDS is addressed, so must be the indiscriminate sexuality that turned it into an epidemic, which, however, does not sit well with the grass-roots audiences on whose frayed greenbacks the movie industry depends. And so we get a bogus film such as Philadelphia, whose good box office smells of moral BO.

Now from France comes Savage Nights, which, without being a masterpiece, is honest, artistic, and disturbing: instead of providing glib answers, it asks difficult questions. It is written, directed, and starred in by Cyril Collard, a writer, musician, photographer, sailing instructor, and occasional actor, who adapted it from his second and last novel. One of the first French public figures to declare themselves HIV-positive at a time when this required real courage, Collard died of AIDS at 35, three days before his film won four Cesars (French Oscars), including the one for best picture. The novel was statedly autobiographical; the movie, on which Jacques Fieschi collaborated with Collard, departs from it in small but significant ways: it loses something in breadth, but gains in concentration.

Jean, the quasi-autobiographical hero, is first shown as a cameraman during the Algerian troubles, where he has some contact with a mysterious woman--the film is vague here-- which may be the cause of his infection. Later, back in Paris, the bisexual Jean leads a life of, possibly infection-generated, excess. By day, he works as a cameraman; by night, he drives his red convertible at maniacal speeds, or has garish sex under bridges with strange men, often several at a time. He gets involved with two lovers: Laura, a 17-year-old would-be actress in commercials; and Samy, a young Spaniard, soccer player, and holder of odd jobs. Samy has a girlfriend whom he eventually leaves for Jean; Laura has a wise mother to whom she tearfully returns whenever Jean ditches her for Samy.

There are understatedly grim scenes with Jean at the hospital for tests, and lively ones showing him at work as a cameraman. A characteristic scene has, for instance, Jean and Samy picking up a prostitute (played by an improbably pretty young actress) who is an art student by day, and indulging in a threesome that ends poorly. Or Jean will be alone at night as Laura keeps phoning and leaving angry, weepy, pleading, or threatening messages on the answering machine, which Jean listens to as other people listen to records.

Samy is taken to M. Andre's, a house of heterosexual orgies and sadomasochistic male encounters, where he meets Pierre Ollivier, a man who organizes skinheads into vicious antiArab squads; Ollivier eventually recruits Samy as well. Alone, Jean and Laura enjoy passionate sex; with Samy around, the situation becomes more complicated and heterodox. When Jean first has intercourse with Laura, unable to accept his sickness, he does not tell her that he is HIV-positive. When, much later in the film, he tells her, she has an outburst of rage, but quickly forgives him. When they are about to have sex again, and he puts on a condom, the girl, tenderly and terrifyingly, removes it: she believes that her love alone can keep both of them from harm. In a still later scene, after one of Jean's periodic rejections, Laura shouts at him and the entire street from a balcony, accusing him of infecting and destroying her. We are never told whether she is telling the truth; the scene, regardless, is crushing.

However shattering, the scenes are artistically controlled in their violence: as when Laura discovers Samy, Jean, and an ex-girlfriend of his in a threesome; or when Samy (in an outburst of what?) repeatedly slashes his own chest with a razor; or when Laura, once again rejected, vandalizes her mother's apartment, which she shares; or when the mother, in an effort to negotiate peace, meets Laura and Jean at a fast-food restaurant, and the meeting degenerates abominably. Yet the film is by no means unrelievedly gloomy; there are humorous, idyllic, intensely sensuous or sensual passages as well.

Laura finally finds someone else on the Riviera, whither Jean follows her, only to be ever so gently rejected in turn. But this is not the end, either. Rather, when Jean calls her from an assignment in Portugal, at the farthest tip of Europe, they have (less explicitly than in the book) telephonic sex, and Laura tells him that all he has to do is say he loves her and she'll come running. But he can't, and proceeds to immerse himself ever more desperately in nature.

This is a scary film, but only one scene rings untrue (it is not in the novel): to stop Ollivier, Samy, and the gang from mutilating an Arab, Jean cuts his finger and threatens to infect Ollivier with his tainted blood unless the thugs are called off. Otherwise, the movie feels ungainsayably factual. It certainly isn't pornographic: these are three-dimensional human beings experiencing genuine pain, not merely a simulacrum of suffering as an aphrodisiac for unwholesome audiences. It is a sadomasochism not of whips and chains, but of sexual rewards and withholdings, domination and submission, as everyone takes turns as tormentor and tormented.

You may find Laura's willingness, indeed eagerness, to risk infection incredible. (In the novel, that scene is played out between Samy and Jean.) But consider: Romane Bohringer, the young actress who plays Laura opposite Collard's Jean, knew that her leading man was HIV-positive, yet willingly acted these sex scenes with much open-mouthed kissing. Isn't this rather like the film's story: life imitating art, however improbable?

As a study of obsession, Savage Nights rises well above its sordid specifics. Jean and Samy's problem is that they desperately want love; Laura's is excess of love, utter and frenetic. The French title, Les Nuits fauves, is especially resonant. Fauve is not "savage," but "wild beast," the name adopted by a famous, coloristically ferocious school of painters. It also means "tawny," evoking nights of livid illumination, louche surroundings, and lurid passions. Further, it means a musky smell; here, the odor of sex. The film with its fauve nights, has something to say to people who are neither homosexual nor bisexual, neither unbridled sensualists nor slaves of passion.

Cyril Collard has acted and directed persuasively. All the actors are good, but the prize goes to Romane Bohringet as Laura: a young woman of unremarkable looks, her acting, like her face, is transfigured by the beauty of sheer truthfulness. The performance is not merely heart-rending; it is also a lesson in how inextricably beauty and abjectness can coexist in one face, one body, one soul. And Manuel Teran's frequently hand-held camera seems to burrow into Laura and the rest in its pursuit of unmediated, unmitigated reality.

What I found particularly moving is the film's clenched reluctance to let go. Toward the end, scene after scene looks to be the last, but isn't; always there is more. You can feel Collard hanging on, literally, for dear life: as if, as long as he was making his movie, he could not die.