BRATTLEBORO — San Francisco, 1985. Many will recall this time as a pivotal point in the history of the AIDS epidemic, with the introduction of a new blood test for HIV.
It was also a time of a major cultural shift in San Francisco among the gay communities, and in society at large. At the time, people were all too aware of the disease that so many were dying from, but how to deal with it was still a mystery, and it was open-hunting season on the gay lifestyle.
The film Test reveals these major shifts through the lives of a few men in a remarkable dance company.
Frankie (Scott Marlowe) is an intense young dancer, learning a new routine from a difficult choreographer and jostling for respect in the company of dancers. He clashes particularly with Todd (the darkly handsome Matthew Risch), a relationship whose journey forms the arc of the story.
Director Chris Mason Johnson uses the visual as the most powerful form of communication. Speech is spare, but spot on. The aesthetic of the body in Sidra Bell's choreography creates a line of expression throughout, an exceptional vehicle for expressing Frankie's journey, as well as so many other nuances through the film.
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Frankie must make choices as countless others did, including whether to take the blood test and, subsequently, how to live a new life in the knowledge of the test's results.
The film excels at conveying a quiet but emotional undercurrent, with unwaveringly honest storytelling about the isolation and conspicuous silence of the AIDS epidemic.
An ominous miasma settles over the city as everyone fears and questions the strange disease. One of the dancers must break from a rehearsal to ask her dancing partner to mop up his sweat, which is dripping onto her face. Frankie and other gay dancers inspect themselves obsessively, but secretly, for minute signs of skin blemishes that might spell life or death.
A mix of educational and homophobic street signs and graffiti punctuate the action, and other reminders of the time pull the viewer into the San Francisco of the mid '80s: a new device - a Walkman - that cleverly lets us hear Frankie's music; the clothes, the lamps, and decor; the phones with curly cords that will get as tangled as one's life.
The distinct atmosphere of the city is everywhere, from the lovely façades of the homes to the misty skies. Frankie moves deliberately through it all, intently focused on his career, as his old life is shed for the strange new world ahead.
And yet, to say that “Test” is an uplifting film, focusing on the young people making decisions in the face of an unpredictable fate, pursuing dreams, finding new ways forward in a strange time, does not do it justice. It's entertaining, it's very well crafted, it's an extraordinary human drama.
But there's something else about it.
Ah - it's in the dance. Yes, the dance of life that will endure when all else is gone.