ZERO PATIENCE USA, 1993 Director: John Greyson
Stars: John Robinson, Normand Fauteux
Zero Patience, an absurd musical comedy, is a gem amidst the gravel of New Queer Cinema. Though it contains many of the contrived hallmarks of its dreary contemporaries, it’s also - unlike them - a very funny, smart and moving film. It faces AIDS head on but maintains a buoyant, cheery pitch, rather than using nihilism and grunge to demonstrate how “homophobia” and “society” are to blame for the woes of its doomed but cute young lovers who (see, for example, The Living End).
Sir Richard Francis Burton (John Robinson) is a Victorian explorer who, having drank from the Fountain of Youth, is alive and well in 1993, working as a taxidermist and consultant to the Toronto Natural History Museum. He’s taken with the story of Patient Zero (Normand Fauteux) and wants to stage a multimedia AIDS exhibit that tells the story of Zero and the spread of the epidemic. The dead Zero is reincarnated in buff pre-ARC shape, and collaborates with Burton, then they briefly become lovers.
Armed with a video camera, Burton visits Zero’s old friends, some of whom are now active members of ACT-UP, his doctors, and his ex-lovers and mother. Along the way we’re treated to hilarious musical numbers performed by, among other things, stuffed African Green Monkeys, butt holes, and HIV herself, personified as Diva by none other than Michael Callen, floating on an inner tube in full glamour drag on a sea of timid T-Helper cells.
Everyone from Randy Shilts to Leo Bersani cops it, but the film’s best moments are its humiliations of ACT-UP, several hilarious scenes that highlight that misguided organisation’s contradictions and embarrassing love of slogans and simplicity. In this film, ACT-UP members run about like characters inside an episode of “Mission: Impossible”, disrupting anything that asks legitimate but confronting questions about AIDS.
Burton’s video interviews are terminated by manic activists once the questioning turns to Zero, while dopey ACT-UP meetings are revealed to be wordy tonic sessions for confused, panic-stricken people who want a sense a certain “control” over the uncontrollable. “Control is what we need”, says the local chapter’s ringleader, as she plans disruptions of the exhibition and pretty much anything else that involves AIDS.
It’s all done with delicious spite, but it’s also very touching and tragic to see people try and stamp some form of secondary ownership and manipulation over something that in fact has them wholly entangled in its own deadly, spiderwoman clutches.
The only qualm I have here is the sex scene between Burton and Zero, which, in a film full of surreal, gross out moments, is pictured just a little too romantically and inoffensively. Face to face in missionary position, they squeeze each other’s butt cheeks and writhe around erotically, but any man who’s tried to writhe around, face to face, on top of another man, knows all you end up with is squashed balls. Surely a film this overt and confrontational could have included a bit of good old fashioned rear entry, or at least junked the idea that gay sex is “normal”.
