SAVAGE NIGHTS (Directed by and starring Cyril Collard. With Romane Bohringer, Carlos Lopez)

"Savage Nights" (Les Nuits Fauves) has a lot to live up to, or live down. The winner of four Césars this year, the French equivalent of Oscars, it simultaneously represents the cinematic debut of a promising talent and his swan song. Cyril Collard, who wrote, starred, directed (and, like a true one man band, sang a collection of his own songs on the soundtrack), died, aged 35, of AIDS-related illness, just three days before his film was so lavishly awarded.

Based on his own, presumably at least semi-autobiographical novel, Collard plays Jean, a bi-sexual cameraman diagnosed HIV positive, who carries on living his life at breakneck speed, with scant regard for others. In a dream he is told to learn from his disease, instead he tried to ignore it. He cruises gay men in a shadowy no-man's land, drives his little red sports car like a lunatic with a death wish and begins simultaneous affairs with Samy (Carlos Lopez), a dangerously bored rugby player, and Laura (Romane Bohringer), a worldly wise teenager.

The first, and most obvious, moral crunch comes early on, when he makes unprotected love with is new girlfriend. Yet this incident has become too much the focus of debate about the film. Collard more than adequately explains the action with his confession that he cannot perceive the disease as part of himself, and makes his hero (himself) ultimately accept responsibility and try to atone for it.

In the film's most melodramatic moment, he attempts to use his illness in a positive way, intervening in a racist fight by threatening to spill his contaminated blood on the assailants. As the victim walks away unharmed, an attacker mutters about resurrection, and the life threatening disease is somehow transformed into life giving.

Yet to discuss (or worse, dismiss) "Savage Nights" as an AIDS movie would be a mistake. It is hardly a disease-of-the-decade film: the worst we see is a touch of night sweats and one innocuous looking fleck of Kaposi's sarcoma. Like its central character, the film lives with HIV but does not make it the centre of its being. It is, rather, a movie about the human condition, about a modern lifestyle that encourages a kind of perpetual adolescence, and about the physical and emotional crises that lead to growth.

That it deals so straightforwardly with AIDS is good, that it has become the centre of a cinematic AIDS debate is an unfortunate consequence of the fact that there are so few other films that even touch on AIDS, a subject that has surely had a more profound effect on consciousness and lifestyles in our time than any other.

This, to me, makes "Savage Nights" an essential film for the conscientious cinema-goer. That it is such a vigorous, lively and dedicatedly perverse entertainment is a major bonus. It is as if, in the last years of his life, collard put everything and the kitchen sink into his debut film, knowing perhaps that it would be the only surviving testimony to his own existence.

The largely hand held camera movements are inventive and bold, the editing is of a slap-bang kinetic variety, matching the frenzied pace at which Jean lives his life. The rough-hewn texture of the visuals is matched to an apparently improvisational style of acting that lends the whole a verité feel.

This almost semi-documentary style successfully binds together extremely disparate elements. The plot, if you could call it that, is sprawling and scattershot, making few simple connections, leaping from incident to incident, and character to character with the audience trailing along behind. While Collard is the focus, Roman Bohringer elicits both humour and sympathy as a teenager in love, failing to cope with her partner's lovelessness and self absorption.

Her breakdown, in which she leaves endless messages on his answerphone, becomes the voice of Jean's conscience. And Samy, even more addicted to the concept of continual stimulation than Jean, becomes his darker counterpart as, despite his own bisexuality and interracial family, he is drawn to neo-nazism for its sheer excessiveness.

Filled with contradiction and confusion, avoiding (for the most part) easy judgements and dramatic resolution, "Savage Nights" has the genuine feel of a slice of life, mostly the low-life of a Parisienne sexual twilight zone. At times, Collard's relentless enthusiasm for his own character borders on the narcissistic and his energetic camera style can appear overstated. Lacking in specific narrative drive the film is not without its longueurs. But, in its dedication to life, real life, its flaws seem somehow preferable to Hollywood polish.

"Savage Nights" is no masterpiece, it is the passionately naïve work of a first time film-maker, dealing uncompromisingly and unrepentantly with issues too many veteran film-makers have turned a blind eye to. If it would be wrong to view it as an AIDS film, it nonetheless serves to remind us of the appalling human cost of the virus as we are introduced to a vibrant, occasionally enthralling cinematic talent with the knowledge that we will never see or hear from him again.