Hot Docs '19: Killing Patient Zero

**½/****
directed by Laurie Lynd

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda "Everyone was praying it was going to be something we could give up," editor and interviewee Michael Denneny says in a sobering moment in Laurie Lynd's Killing Patient Zero, which offers a moving if somewhat scattershot account of the collision between sexual liberation, panic, and state indifference in the early days of the AIDS crisis while fleshing out the life of so-called "patient zero," Gaétan Dugas. Based on Richard McKay's book on Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant remembered here for his charisma and frankness about his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was pathologized as an illness in North America, Lynd's film is most effective as a reparative intervention into its subject's cruel afterlife as the media's favoured scapegoat in false summaries of the early transmission of HIV. Yet the documentary's emotional impact is dulled by Lynd's vestigial gestures to the source text (from which McKay awkwardly reads via a teleprompter), his overly familiar style (which cribs its score from The Social Network and its interview setup from Errol Morris), and his curious compulsion to frequently sideline Dugas's story to make way for talking-head interviews with a who's who of queer celebrities, such as Fran Lebowitz and B. Ruby Rich.

Despite the ominous title and some zippy animatics that would feel more appropriate in a virology thriller, Killing Patient Zero works best when it foregoes this vaguely-sketched systemic narrative to focus on animating the particular case of Dugas through the first-person accounts of his friends, ex-lovers, and co-workers. Lynd's unobtrusive and refreshingly non-prescriptive interviews with Dugas's queer colleagues at Air Canada are especially tender, capturing the men's alternating awe and jealousy of their friend's openness and pride during a painful period they associate with the closet. Lynd also clearly delineates the series of logical shortcuts and journalistic lapses by which Dugas was transformed in the public eye from a helpful and transparent source of information into a Typhoid Mary-styled foreign vector of disease, smoothly cross-cutting between sources like CDC officials, historians such as McKay, and Denneny, whose dicey editorial contributions to Randy Shilt's book And the Band Played On helped tarnish Dugas's legacy. Yet in juggling so many competing rhetorical purposes and styles, Lyn sometimes loses sight of his subject, producing something as safe as Dugas was unexpected. Programme: Special Presentations