Zero Patience

ZERO PATIENCE   ***1/2

John Greyson

1993

IDEA:  After an inadvertent encounter with the Fountain of Youth, Sir Richard Francis Burton finds himself working in Toronto, Canada as a taxidermist at a natural history museum in the early 1990s. While curating an exhibit focused on contagions, he meets the ghost of Patient Zero, the man accused of bringing AIDS to North America. 

BLURB:  Filtering righteous sociopolitical anger and passionate activism through an irreverent camp musical fantasia, Zero Patience demonstrates the power of humor in confronting even the most painful realities. Few would likely arrive at “musical comedy” when envisioning a vehicle for a story about the AIDS epidemic, but Greyson, in true New Queer Cinema fashion, is not working by the book. His Zero Patience is a film of forceful counter-narrative, a refutation and rebuke of LGBTQ stigmatization and the dominant cultural discourses that normalize it. The film is expectedly critical of the role of mass media in this process, but its polemic expands much further to unpack the multiple, intersecting institutional apparatuses that comprise any hegemonic system of oppression. Within its bawdy parade of invention - from duetting anuses to an HIV virus personified as an acerbic queen - Zero Patience takes wide and astute aim at the indifference of the government, the vampiric greed of the pharmaceutical industry, and the legacies of scientific knowledge and the historical archive in marginalizing whole swaths of people under the pretense of empiricism. Greyson chooses not to frame these predations in the palatable, populist mode of solemn lament; although he does display a decidedly Canadian brand of vexation, it’s the cheerful, freewheeling spirit with which he rips through the myths and misconceptions around AIDS that makes Zero Patience literally sing. Not all of its elements cohere into a seamless vision or experience, but the film’s sheer conceptual, comic audacity makes the case for it as a work of ingenious LGBTQ media advocacy.

Top Gun: Maverick

TOP GUN: MAVERICK   **

Joseph Kosinski

2022

IDEA:  Sent back to the Top Gun program as an instructor, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell prepares his young protégés for a deadly mission while confronting past demons.

BLURB:  Vanity projects rarely come as extravagantly pompous as Top Gun: Maverick, in which Tom Cruise summons the budget and aircraft arsenal of the United States military to prove to us (and himself) that not only has he still got It, but that he’s more virile and capable than ever. Whether screaming through the sky in a supersonic jet or being fawned over by the obligatory supportive girlfriend, the actor advances an earnestly grandiose, uncomplicated image of masculine inviolability. The distance between Cruise’s character and his public persona has been all but completely collapsed; to watch Top Gun: Maverick is thus to enter into a documentary consciousness, a heightened awareness of the extra-diegetic elements that are inextricable from the film’s fiction, and vice versa. The use of real military jets - and their employment in admittedly breathtaking aerial action sequences - attests to the material, logistical, and financial magnitude of the production, while also providing a literal vehicle for indulging Cruise’s penchant for death-taunting peacocking. It’s ironic that Top Gun: Maverick goes to such lengths to feel “real” in the physical sense when its narrative, characterizations, and ideology are so consistently cartoonish. Yes, American jingoism is baked into this franchise, but did the big enemy of a 2022 sequel need to be so risibly, literally faceless? Couldn’t the new Top Gun team have used even a modicum of color or nuance or anything resembling a compelling human character trait? Of course, the absence of realism and introspection is wholly intentional, serving the film’s simple-minded purpose of lionizing Maverick and American military might, and by extension Cruise’s insatiable mid-life appetite for public displays of body-pushing self-mythologizing. “Don’t think, just do,” indeed.

La Piscine

LA PISCINE   **1/2

Jacques Deray

1969

IDEA:  A couple's summer idyll in the south of France is disrupted by the arrival of the girlfriend's former flame and his 18-year-old daughter.

BLURB:  A decadent coastal villa with too much space for its inhabitants; bodies idling in estival torpor; copious pregnant silences and numbed gazes from behind glass; indeed, we’re in the self-consciously modernist territory of bourgeois ennui in La Piscine. Specifically, the bourgeois ennui of two supernaturally attractive French people played by Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, whose starched, iconized figures serve as synecdoches of the film’s sumptuous but largely vacuous visual allure. Positioned within Deray’s manicured, late-60s chic aesthetic, they’re more objects of sensual contemplation than multidimensional characters, at once embodying an ad-mass image of epicurean beauty and luxury and a banal idea of a vain, myopic social elite. La Piscine builds its drama from the interpersonal trouble that inevitably surfaces within their paradise, with Deray showing a special predilection for the unspoken tensions that thrum under placid stretches of summery repose. Yet the film’s languors are often more moribund than scintillating, the suspense falling slack within a rote schema of sexual jealousy, narcissism, and becalmed amorality. La Piscine is consistently snazzy in its lensing, costuming, and production design, but it’s never quite as formally entrancing or as interesting as it fancies itself. Perhaps that’s just another way in which it reflects its charmed but charmless protagonists.