COLUMN ONE : France Wakes Up to AIDS : Apart from the United States, the French have the most AIDS cases in the West. But the death of a young filmmaker has jolted them into a belated awareness of the epidemic.

It was almost too sad and too ironic even for the movies: A handsome, talented young director wins the top French cinema award for his first film--a moving, autobiographical account of a young Parisian bisexual man, played in the film by the director himself, who discovers he is HIV-positive and struggles with the consequences.

Three days before the gala awards ceremony at which his film would capture the country’s top cinematic honor--the Cesar award for best French film of 1992--the director dies of AIDS.

Unfortunately, the scenario is all too true.

The director’s name was Cyril Collard, and his real-life death last week at age 35 turned the glittering Cesar awards ceremony Monday night at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees into an emotional, tearful posthumous lament to fallen youth and snuffed-out talent.

“Cyril,” said a sobbing Romane Bohringer, the 18-year-old actress who played Collard’s female lover in the film, “I hope somewhere in heaven you have already found a camera and film.”

But more than anything else, Collard’s death has underscored France’s delayed recognition of the deadly syndrome and its terrible toll, particularly in the country’s treasured artistic community.

Next to the United States, France has the highest number of AIDS cases in the West. But until the recent deaths in Paris of the great ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and Collard, who was also known in France as a songwriter, the gravity of the AIDS epidemic had not really been brought home to the French public.

“Unhappily, you have to say that the United States has a five-year lead on France when it comes to an understanding of the disease,” commented Arnaud Marty-Lavauzelle, president of Federation AIDES, a French organization involved in building public awareness of the disease.

Health experts, sociologists and AIDS political activists give several reasons for France’s relatively slow recognition of the killer in its midst.

For one, the French tradition of respecting a person’s private life--the same tradition that has historically attracted many foreign homosexuals to the country--also discourages people infected with the AIDS virus from coming forward and working to raise public awareness.

In Nureyev’s case, for example, although it was widely rumored that the Russian-born, longtime director of the Paris Opera Ballet was suffering from AIDS (he had secretly received the diagnosis that he was HIV-positive in 1984), the dancer himself forbade doctors and friends from disclosing the news. Only several days after his death did his doctor, Michel Canesi, finally reveal the cause of death.

Another important reason cited for the reluctance of French celebrities to be public about AIDS--in stark contrast to high-profile roles played by such prominent American personalities as Magic Johnson and the late Arthur Ashe--is that many artists and actors in France also work often in the United States, where laws still ban HIV-positive foreigners from entering the country.

“Nureyev was terrified that someone would find out,” Canesi said in an interview with the newspaper Figaro. “He knew that in the United States and other countries, entry was banned for those who were HIV-positive. For him, it was like cutting off his wings.”

With many French gays still closeted, gay political groups that have played a leading role in public education on the virus in the United States have only recently surfaced in France.

“There is no visibility, no gay pride in France compared to the United States,” said Marty-Lavauzelle. “It has begun to appear only recently as a result of the epidemic. A new consciousness is emerging to face the issue.”

Another factor that has slowed the French response to the disease: For the past two years, the press coverage here of the AIDS epidemic has been concentrated on the sensational, dramatic plight of several thousand French hemophiliacs, infected with the AIDS virus in the course of blood transfusions monitored by the French government. More than 300 hemophiliacs of the country’s 8,000 hemophiliacs have since died of AIDS-related ailments.

The resulting scandal became an important political issue in France, resulting in the conviction last October of three former government doctors.

But the trial and press coverage also diverted attention from the spread of the disease in other high-risk groups, including homosexuals and intravenous drug users, as well as the mounting rate among heterosexuals.

Statistically, according to the Ministry of Health, France has 24,000 men and women with active AIDS cases, about 44% of whom are homosexuals or bisexuals and 28% of whom are intravenous drug users. Slightly fewer than 13% of the reported cases involve heterosexuals, and only 4% are the much-publicized hemophiliac AIDS victims. An estimated 300,000 French have been diagnosed as HIV-positive.

Signs of the new French militancy on the AIDS issue were in evidence on Saturday as more than 8,000 demonstrators took to the streets in Paris, the largest such protest ever staged in France by AIDS groups.

The demonstrators urged that French politicians address the disease and government prevention and research programs in their campaigns before French parliamentary elections later this month. Many carried signs demanding rhetorically: “Against AIDS. Which Candidate?”

Unlike in the United States, where AIDS and its treatment have become high-profile issues, the disease is low on the political agenda in France, except for opposition claims of government responsibility in the hemophiliac cases.

But largely thanks to Collard and his remarkably successful first film, “Les Nuits Fauves” (“Wild Nights”), French public awareness of the virus was given a dramatic, although highly controversial, push.

The popular success of the film may be attributed in part to Collard’s ability to mix serious, graphic sexual scenes with other depictions of humor and tenderness, snapshots of a daily life that goes on despite the onset of the fatal virus. His goal, he said in one interview, was to make ordinary--to “banalize” in the French expression--the life of a young man living under a potential death sentence.

“The film,” said producer Mella Banfi as she accepted the award for the year’s best movie, “is a cry of rage, a cry of courage and a cry of love.”

But not everyone viewed the film in a positive light, especially when it was first released. Some opponents say the film raises the right issue but makes exactly the wrong point.

After learning that he was HIV-positive in 1986, Collard first created “Les Nuits Fauves” as a novel, published in 1989.

His professional background in film, as assistant to noted director Maurice Pialat among others, led him to approach several producers with the idea of making “Les Nuits Fauves” into a movie. Only one, independent producer Banfi, agreed to come up with the $5 million needed to make the film.

After several French actors declined the leading role, which required homosexual love scenes, Collard decided to star in the film himself, although he had never before acted in a movie.

Released late last year to a handful of theaters, the movie instantly sparked a controversy and developed a cult audience that reached far beyond the French gay community.

The controversy occurred because the 30-year-old central character in the film, played by Collard, has sex with his girlfriend without protection and without informing her that he is HIV-positive. In another, even more controversial scene, the girlfriend, played by Bohringer--who won the Cesar for “best young hope” for her portrayal--refuses to allow her lover to use a condom, even after he tells her about his HIV-positive status.

Both scenes run directly counter to the nationwide government billboard campaign encouraging the use of condoms. Before his death on Friday, Collard defended the love scenes, saying they reflected the general ignorance about the disease that existed in 1986, the year in which the film is set.

“I’m not stupid or crazy enough to criticize the use of condoms,” he said in an interview with Agence-France Presse. “But my film is not an advertising spot for the Ministry of Health.”

After first opposing the film as encouraging unsafe sex, some AIDS activist groups came to support the movie after they saw its broad public appeal. The death of a celebrity already has increased French AIDS awareness, much as happened in the case of American actor Rock Hudson.

“The death of well-known people,” said Mathieu Dupley, vice president of ACT UP, the international AIDS activist movement, “especially people like Cyril Collard, who was very energetic, makes it much easier to talk about the disease.”

Since October, more than 900,000 people have seen the Collard film, a large audience in France.

The prestigious Cesar award for best French film of the year--the equivalent of the Oscar for best movie in the United States--is certain to give the movie a second life in France. Fifteen other countries, including the United States, have asked for distribution rights.

Producer Banfi said Monday that she also has been approached by two American studios about making an English-language version of the movie, reflecting a recent trend that has included the original French film “Trois Hommes et un Couffin” (remade in the United States as “Three Men and a Baby”) and “Le Retour de Martin Guerre” (recently released in the English-language remake version as “Sommersby,” starring Richard Gere and Jodie Foster).

But Banfi said she would not allow the remake unless the film were also distributed in the United States in its original version. “I spoke to Cyril and he agreed,” she said.

For many young people in France living in the age of AIDS, Collard’s film was a breakthrough that appeared to touch their daily fears and insecurities.

The dramatic conclusion of the film, in which Jean, Collard’s character, is shown standing on a cliff in Spain looking across the Strait of Gibraltar, was viewed by many French teen-agers as an assertion of life over the threat of death.

“I am probably going to die of AIDS,” says Jean. “But that’s not my life any longer. I am part of life.”

In one of 4,000 letters that Collard received after his movie was released, an 18-year-old boy from Tours wrote his appreciation. “An immense fear of death haunted me since childhood. Compared to you, this fear seemed ridiculous, grotesque, without basis,” he said.

Sarah White, a researcher in The Times’ Paris bureau, contributed to this report.