CINEMA: Justin Pearce
THE unique charms of Zero Patience can be gleaned from a quick run through of this film’s musical numbers: a bluesy solo sung by a blonde, beehived HIV virus; a Victorian scientist, who has discovered the secret of eternal youth, delivering an ode to enlightenment values, called Let’s All Be Empiricists; a chorus of stuffed jungle animals coming to life in their museum display case and protesting at being stigmatised as the first carriers of the immuno-deficiency
In fact, the particular marriage of form and content — a toe-tapping musical on the subject of Aids — says a lot about this film’s brand of irreverence. How it manages this without being completely tasteless is by focusing on the social malaise that surrounded the arrival of Aids in North America — “an epidemic of blame”, as one character calls it — and turning the myths on their heads. At the time, much of the hysteria around Aids concerned a gay air steward, dubbed “Patient Zero”, who was blamed for bringing the epidemic across the Atlantic. In the film, “Patient Zero” is reincarnated to challenge his accusers.
The devices which Canadian director John Grayson uses in his cinematic expos provide much of the film’s fascination — the boldness of its execution leaves you breathless, the lurid colours and catchy tunes echoed by the in-your-face innovation of the plot. The 19th-century scientist finds himself a perfect niche as a perpetrator of Aids hysteria in modern Canada, implying that the old truisms about Victorian morality apply equally well to the late 20th century — and suggesting what Victorian scientists might have got up to given the benefits of contemporary technology.
And yet the film is no circus, with an unlikely love story and a subplot concerning the travails of a schoolteacher with HIV bringing the metaphorical shennanigans down to
Zero Patience is unashamedly activist filmmaking, which adds to its immediacy, but also means it doesn’t travel well in space or time. Here in Africa, where no one has tried blaming Aids on an individual, the film’s process of debunking carries less of a punch than it surely did in Canada. But Aids in Africa is no less cocooned in myths, even if they are different. Zero Patience is invigorating as a movie that knocks down sacred cows, and it does so without establishing any new idols of its own.
Zero Patience is at the 81/2 Club in Rosebank