Zero Patience -- A Movie Musical about AIDS on DVD

You have to love Canadian film making; it is so much more adventuresome than American movies (at least the ones I see). Yet the films of our Canadian counterparts are still relatively accessible to me, whereas European independent films are too out there most of the time for me. So when a friend of mine loaned me the soundtrack to Zero Patience--A Movie Musical about AIDS, I was glad to find the film available through Netflix, since it is a Canadian production. And if I hadn't watched the film connected to this soundtrack, I think I would have been completely baffled by the score.

This film from 1993 follows a 180 year-old British scientist (who looks pretty good, considering) as he puts together a museum exhibit on this history of epidemics in Toronto. Rather the exhibit is in Toronto, the epidemics were everywhere, which I guess makes them pandemics. As part of his research, the 180 year-old British scientist looks into the story behind Patient Zero, a real life French-Canadian airline steward who was an early AIDS victim and critical in the determination in 1982 or so that HIV was sexually transmitted.

Well, during the course of his research, Patient Zero appears to the 180 year-old British scientist; the two enter into a love affair and the course of the museum exhibit is altered from blaming "Zero" as a Typhoid Mary-like figure, to understanding that it took some amount of courage and understanding for "Zero" to cooperate with the medical community prying into his sexual history. During the course of the film, we also see several of Zero's friends struggle with the disease and involved with an Act Up protest.

The music in this film forms the more outlandish fantasy sequences of the story. It is treated a bit like a music video, with the music commenting on the situation in the story rather than moving the story along. There is a funny song called the Butthole Duet which use disturbing puppets. The music is mostly in an 90s pop style. The only song I really cared for was the duet ballad "Six or Seven Things" which is a lovely song about lost love.

Zero Patience--a Musical Movie about AIDS
released in 1993
Screenplay by John Greyson
Music by Glenn Schellenberg
Lyrics by John Greyson and Glenn Schellenberg
Directed by John Greyson
Cast: John Robinson, Normand Fauteux, Diane Heatherington, Richardo Keens-Douglas