Word: collards
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...William Winborn's criticism of Cyril Coallard's "Savage Nights" ("Dramatic, Passionate, Mad `Saving Nights' Scintillates," movie review, April 14, 1994 is, If I read him correctly, itself perhaps an example of our current level of spiritual consciousness which Collard's him tries hard to itself break through...
...film's end, as Windborn recognizes, is more rough sketch than any full rendering of a new dawn of wholeness (that sea, that night, that survey form land's ending of life's ending) these cliches perhaps more pointer to epiphany than believable rendering of it--I fell Collard's intent, even though never quite reached, makes necessary a rather more generous critique of "Savage Nights" that Winborn's eventual and, as I read him regretful dismissal...
However, this is nothing compared to the exaggerated emotion which follows. Collard shows Laura in the mids of a psychological obsession. She calls Jean 24 hours a day, leaving insane message of death, terror and suicide. Finally, Laura is carted off to the insane asylum...
Perhaps we are to assume that Collard believes Jean's quotation at the beginning of the film, "Only violence can put an end to man's ways," because we get to see plenty of violence-domestic, sexual and racial. The film attempts to achieve a fervent pitch of turbulent emotion, but is incapable to sustaining it. The goal here seems to be to achieve the numbing qualities of a "Reservoir Dogs" but ends without delving deeply enough below the emotional skin to make the audience empathize with any of the characters...
From the beginning, we see Jean's careless sexual activities, and as emotionally-charged as AIDS is, one cannot help but believe that on some level he must assume responsibility for the God-complex which leads him to play with the lives of others. Collard shows Jean having sex with random men in abandoned buildings, picking up people on the street and engaging in his fetish, being urinated on. Squeamishness is what Collard is counting on in the viewer, but the eventual emotion evoked is not pathos but repulsion...