"Les nuits fauves" is one of the most honest films I have ever seen about human condition and one of the aspects of our sexuality. For a start, the depiction of ambisexuality is quite sincere, showing the suffering this ambiguous sexual behavior (considered an orientation, in spite of its apparent lack of direction) brings to people really involved or in love with the so-called bisexual entity who feels attracted to both men and women. The motion picture is not fiction or a bad joke, but mainly facts based on Cyril Collard's own life, who infected the woman he was involved with (played here by Romane Bohringer), knowing he was HIV-positive. First came the revelation through the novel of the same title, and then the film, in which he played his own part because no French actor even considered to play it, finding it too risky for their careers. Collard plays himself apparently as he was: a vain, irresponsible, hedonistic strong case of satyriasis (the male counterpart for female erotic mania), and thanks for his daring to show his lifestyle, his passions and his mistakes, at least he left a starting point for open-minded partners to discuss a subject that may be affecting their relationships. It is a film as hard and bleak as Wong Kar-Wai's "Happy Together", but both are necessary. There is time for "To Wong Foo" and for "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert"; there is even time for explicitness. But there should be also time for putting moralistic judgment aside, and watch and talk about dramas that show aspects of our condition that we tend to trivialize or deny, and that may make unhappy the persons we love. Five days after Cyril Collard died, "Les nuits fauves" won the César (France's top film prize) for Best Film, Best First Work, Best Film Editing and Best Female Newcomer (Miss Bohringer, who three years later played again the "victim" of two men in love: Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis, as Rimbaud and Verlaine, in Total Eclipse). Collard's motion picture also won the Audience Award, the International Film Critics Prize and the Special Jury Prize at the Festival of Young Cinema, in Torino, Italy.
Review of Savage Nights
