Cyril Collard's autobiographical film, completed just before his death from AIDS, proves that good films about the disease can be made, but, and for the same reasons, probably never will be.

Collard avoids the lachrymose and the political, the downfalls of films like Philadelphia and And The Band Played On, and concentrates instead on building an original, realistic and complex central character, and leaving the audience to respond in their own way.

Collard plays Jean, a HIV-positive freelance photographer, living in the Paris fast lane. Nine-parts Collard, Jean (note the everyman name) bears a strong resemblance to Brad Davis’ “Billy Hayes” in 1976’s Midnight Express. Davis’ hero was a rat in a maze, while Collard’s Jean is more of a tragique, trapped by his own smoky fate. Reflecting on his infection, Jean says he wants to make peace, or make sense, of himself, before the virus takes its inevitable course.

He meets two people, and has affairs with both. Laura (Romane Bohringer), a young woman, falls mythologically, hysterically in love with him. Even after he tells her his HIV status, she insists on condom-free sex. When Jean pulls away from her, she begins an obsessive pursuit marked with hour long answering machine messages, fliying fists and many tears. Jean's other affair is with Sami (Carlos Lopez), an unemotive younger man, who says he loves Jean but apparently couldn't care less.

Jean's love life mirrors his infection, as he's sucked into a vortex (the possessive, lovestruck, Laura) while his easier, carefree boys life (Sami) begins to detach itself, and disappear from view.

Scenes are either frenetic, and filled to the brim with speeding cars, sweaty sex and drugged out parties, or gentle, focussing on nature, emotion, and existentialism, evoking the unpredictable hurricane/eye of the storm rhythm of living with and dying from AIDS in the early nineties.

By contrast, Philadelphia presented the disease as an obedient legal secretary, keeping pace with Tom Hanks' court case, and rising up at key moments to help guide the jury to the correct decision. Once they've settled in his favour, he dies. The unintentionally hilarious New Zealand television film A Death In The Family depicts a similarly polite virus, one which infects an angelic, lovely man, and keeps him alive long enough to allow all his friends and relatives to make their peace with him, and the circumstances of his death. Once they do, he dies immediately, I guess before they have time to change their minds.

It's a shame that there are so few "AIDS movies" to reference. I guess when they are realistic, honest, true to life, like Savage Nights, they don't do good box office - it's just too marginalised for most, and depressing for others. The alternative is HOLLYWAIDS, where the disease disappears beneath socio-political abstracts, and its sufferers are invariably defiant heroes, or tragic angels, elevating awareness of "the cause" through Christ-like courage, resilience and pride (cue: tearjerking death scene).

Collard's excellent film has been left to stand pretty much alone, then, as an atypically gritty reminder of a typically gritty life overtaken by AIDS.

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