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...It hurtles toward its conclusion as precipitously as the hero races to his own extinction...

...I found this totally preposterous, but perhaps that's because I've always found Unamuno rather bracing...

...LOVE IN THE RUINS 'SAVAGE NIGHTS' & 'EPOQUE' o describe the (presumably) autobiographical hero of Cyril Collard's Savage Nights as bisexual is about as helpful as calling the Grand Canyon deep or Mozart musically inclined...

...Trueba sees the early days of the Spanish Republic as the "beautiful age" before the triumph of Franco's dictatorship...

...But his realization that he may be infecting others as well as consuming his own dwindling energies pushes Jean further into panic...

...At the beginning, the young deserter innocently incites the mutual slaughter of two members of the National Guard...

...But Belle Epoque is not all joyous sensuality...

...My metabolism runs a little too fast for such relaxations and, since I knew exactly where the plot was going, I wanted more surprises in sheer execution: more piquancy in the dialogue, greater subtleties of framing and editing, acting that was not only as adroit as it is but downright virtuosic (though Fernando Fernan Gomez as Don Manolo is magisterial...

...RICHARD alleva 20...

...In another scene, Jean is calming Laura after a spat and she is subsiding into his arms...

...Fleeing the civil strife of Madrid in the early 1930s, a young army deserter, Fernando, takes refuge in the country house of an old squire, Don Manolo, and soon encounters the gent's four gorgeous daughters—Clara, Violetta, Rocio, and Luz...

...The thought of his perhaps imminent demise plunges him into a state of vertigo which he can quell only by pressing someone's flesh against his own...

...Second, the acting of Romane Bohringer as Laura...

...The editing makes us share the emotional discontinuity of these young people, their inability even to sustain moods, much less relationships...

...Yet the hero doesn't die...

...Then, cut: she has flung him off and is more sulphurous than ever...

...There are moments in this movie when Romane Bohringer lets us see the talons sink in...

...I couldn't buy it...

...It's a leisurely picnic of a movie...

...Jean ricochets between these two, thereby creating brawls, near-insanity in Laura, and heartbreak all around...

...Near the end, the village priest hangs himself, apparently because he's been reading too much Miguel de Unamuno...

...Collard as Jean and Carlos Lopez as Samy are better than okay, but Bohringer is spectacular...

...His HIV diagnosis has accelerated his promiscuity, and it seems to have accelerated the tempo of this movie...

...If there was ever a movie that announced its destination long before arrival, it's Belle Epoque, which won this year's best foreign film Academy Award...

...He can't come to grips with the fact of his own mortality...

...Perhaps I'm just not a picnic person...

...Before the film is twenty minutes old, we know, we are meant to know, that Fernando and the youngest, Luz, are destined for each other...

...What got her going this time...

...Collard revives the jump cutting of Godard' s Breathless and the device has even more utility here than in that classic...

...In this brilliantly staged scene that successfully blends farce and horror, the fact that the guards are related to each other by marriage echoes the internecine nature of the Spanish tragedy...

...The subsequent triangle of husband-wife-lover could have composed an enriching subplot but here functions only to kill time before the (mostly) happy ending arrives...

...Trueba himself may have become bored by the machinery of his plot because just before the coming together of Luz and Fernando, the filmmaker completely shifts his focus to the arrival of Don Manolo's opera singer wife and her manager-lover...

...Jean is trapped in the particularly vicious circle dictated by his temperament...

...And so he abases himself again and again under the bridges and in the sidestreets of Paris with riffraff of the worst sort...

...On the soundtrack he tells us that he now feels at one with the world and therefore no longer in a panic about leaving it...

...The very predictability is meant to be part of our pleasure as we bask in the summery atmosphere of the countryside and take our time savoring the beauty of the women, Fernando's charming ineptitude, the eccentricities of household and neighbors, and the civilized, unhurried pace at which life is taken...

...Collard tries to probe his protagonist's nature with a few colloquys between Jean and his parents, between Jean and friends, former lovers, etc., but these dialogues are no more convincing than similar heart-to-hearts in made-for-TV movies...

...Also, these little skips forward in time convey Jean's feeling of racing to his death...

...On the whole, though, Savage Nights does grip because of two elements...

...Those handsome shots of harbors and canyons have the beauty of a well-made travelogue, not the power of spiritual release...

...Luz knows this, too, but our hero doesn't: he's ready to fall in love with all four women...

...How could it...

...We don't know and we don't have to know...

...Writer-director Fernando Trueba wants us to know in advance how it will all turn out so that we may delight in the details of the romantic journey...

...And, as we shall see, his story doesn't really end...

...I have said that the movie doesn't really end, but Collard does try for a satisfactory conclusion...

...Misused lovers often turn into monomaniacs and monomaniacs can be boring in life and art, but this actress knows how to render the music of fury and so keeps us watching and listening...

...As good as so much of it is, Savage Nights feels, finally, as incomplete as the life of Cyril Collard, who died of AIDS hours before his first and only film received the Cesar (French equivalent of the Oscar) as best movie of 1992...

...It's a comedy of predestination...

...The title itself is both ironic and wistful...

...The progress of this story is the erotic trek of Fernando into and out of the arms of each of the older sisters until he finally arrives at La Luz at the end of the tunnel of love...

...Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves) is very sad, indeed, but it must be the speediest sad movie ever made...

...In Racine's Phaedra the love-possessed heroine speaks of Venus clawing down her victims...

...And, to remind us of the offstage political tragedy even as we enjoy the onstage farce, Trueba bookends the lighthearted sexiness of Fernando's escapades with two disturbing episodes...

...The first erotic encounter is the best—a precarious, cross-dressed grappling with the lesbian-inclined Violetta, but the subsequent entanglements seem incited by push-button...

...It doesn't develop much, either...

...At one point, Samy and Laura are verbally assailing each other and their argument seems to be coming to a boil...

...Apart from his work as a photojournalist, Jean lives for quick, furtive sexual collisions, and he's dying of them, too...

...From two people he seeks more than sex: the seventeen-yearold Laura, a born self-immolator on the pyre of passion, and Samy, a bit of rough trade not without heart but so short on brains and self-esteem that he has to hook up with neo-Nazis in order to prove his masculinity to himself...

...First, the editing...

...He wants his hero to 19 SCREEN attain transcendence of his agony and so, in the last fifteen minutes, the affairs with Samy and Laura both finished, Jean crosses an ocean and communes with nature...

...Then, cut: he is giving her a massage, and the rivals are now so friendly that they come close to making love...