This single scene contains almost more gay sex than HBO’s Looking - the two-season series and the movie combined - and more than any other major film about HIV/AIDS that yet exists. The camera cuts back to Sean’s bed, where he asks Nathan whether he noticed the ones on his body.
His hand traces the other man’s body, feeling its two small Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. They change positions so that Nathan is on top of him - “ Doucement, doucement,” Sean warns - and keep going.Īfterward, Sean asks whether he’s Nathan’s first “ séropo” - HIV-positive person - and Nathan answers, “You’re the first to tell me.” He then narrates his own past sex story, and the scene cuts to yet another room with another man in it. What follows is several minutes of legitimately erotic sex, Sean and Nathan breathing heavily. The sequence takes 15 seconds, and is as perfunctory as removing their pants, but no less crucial to their aims. He takes a pump bottle of lube from the nightstand, which he dispenses into his hand and applies. They continue talking for awhile before having sex a second time: Sean straddles Nathan’s torso, grabs a condom, and puts it on Nathan behind his back. The camera returns to Sean’s body and Nathan reappears beneath him. It’s as though sex is a single, unitary experience, separated by decades but distinguished only by different partners in different rooms. As he begins the story - his first time, at 16, with his math teacher - the camera traces the length of his body, down his back, and suddenly the man he’s speaking of is in the room, behind him, entering him as Sean narrates this vivid, almost haunted return to the past. Nathan asks about a photograph on Sean’s wall, and their conversation progresses to how and when Sean was infected.
Afterward the two disengage, and we hear the sound of condoms being pulled off, Sean carefully knotting his in close-up before throwing it away.
They sixty-nine - Sean repositioning himself, reaching for a condom, opening it, and putting it on in a single motion - and we watch Sean’s free hand grip the muscle of Nathan’s ass between his legs before sitting up again and giving in to Nathan. But before they get too far, Sean tells Nathan he prefers to wear a condom - “it’s safer that way” - and Nathan, who is HIV-negative, obliges. Suddenly they’re falling into bed and frantically undressing themselves. After the two start dancing at a club, lights strobing as their bodies move in and out of the darkness, the scene changes seamlessly. One of the most striking scenes in BPM (Beats Per Minute), Robin Campillo’s historical fiction film about ACT UP in Paris in the early 1990s, is a sex scene - the first between Nathan (Arnaud Valois) and Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), who is HIV-positive.