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Film: Dallas Buyers Club (15)

MARIA DUARTE recommends the story of an Aids sufferer's fight for treatment

Dallas Buyers Club (15)

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee

5 Stars

It took 20 years in the making and now the film that no major Hollywood studio wanted to finance is the toast of the award season with 40 wins and another six Oscar nominations.

More importantly, Dallas Buyers Club puts Aids back in the public consciousness and in the news.

Initially the film received endless publicity due to Matthew McConaughey's frightening weight loss of over three stones to play the real-life Ron Woodroof.

A racist, homophobic and womanising rodeo cowboy from Texas, he was diagnosed HIV positive in 1985. Given just 30 days to live he in fact lived on for another seven years due to his tenacity and his painstaking research.

But it is McConaughey's extraordinary and career-defining performance in bringing Woodroof's incredible David v Goliath battle to a wider audience that is rightly making column inches now and has earned him an Oscar nod. His co-star Jared Leto, up for a gong too, is astonishing and unrecognisable as his fictitious transgender business partner.

The film portrays to poignant effect the shock, anger and myths surrounding the outbreak and transmission of Aids in the 1980s and the power of the pharmaceutical industry in peddling their own branded treatments whatever the cost, a reality which endures to this day.

After being denied access to AZT, the only approved treatment in the US at the time, Woodroof went to Mexico where he was given unapproved pharmaceutical drugs which made a difference. He then smuggled them into the US and sold them to Aids patients.

To circumvent the law he established a club where he charged $400 per month for membership and in exchange members would receive free medication which improved and lengthened their lives. But the authorities refused to acknowledge his initiatives and pursued him relentlessly.

A riveting and unflinching film about a man's fight for the right to life-saving treatment, almost 30 years on Dallas Buyers Club still resonates with contemporary concerns.

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