Test

San Francisco, 1985. Frankie is an understudy in a modern dance company, waiting for a chance to perform. Meanwhile something is moving through the city and nobody quite knows what it is. Word comes that a test has been developed for the first time. Taking it changes nothing, because there is no treatment; knowing the result means only knowing. Frankie cannot decide. Chris Mason Johnson writes and directs. Scott Marlowe plays Frankie. Johnson was a professional dancer himself and wrote the film from inside that world. The rehearsal scenes were shot with actual choreographers and dancers, and the dance is used not as spectacle but as the character's job. The most striking thing is how the fear is built. There is no scene of horror; the fear is in a telephone ringing, a cough, someone missing rehearsal, and the absence of information. That year nobody knew with certainty how the disease was transmitted, and the film reconstructs that uncertainty. The period detail is careful: the music, the clothes and the news broadcasts are faithful to 1985. It stayed small and became known through festivals. Who it is for: viewers curious about the first years of the AIDS crisis and films built on dance. Who it is not for: the narrative is very thin and little happens, and the film ends without arriving at a conclusion.