In the Meantime (120 Beats Per Minute 2017)

Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute (2017) is the fast-paced chronicle of a time of transition toward a new therapeutic status quo for people with AIDS that never seems to arrive fast enough. It is a period piece directed some thirty years after futurity showed up in the form of protease inhibitors turning a terminal diagnosis into a medicated condition. The movie takes up residence on the narrow edge of a meantime that drains immunocompromised bodies waiting for a better course of treatment. Vignette 6 seeks to reoccupy this temporality from the perspective of epidemiological realism.