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3 NEEDLES
Written & Directed by: Thom Fitzgerald.
Produced by: Thom Fitzgerald & Bryan Hofbauer.
Director of Photography: Thomas M. Harting.
Edited by: Susan Shanks.
Music by: Christophe Beck & Trevor Morris.
Released by: Wolfe Releasing.
Country of Origin: Canada. 125 min. Not Rated.
Language: English, Mandarin, Xhosi, French, & Afrikaans with English subtitles.
With: Lucy Liu, Stockard Channing, Sandra Oh, Olympia Dukakis, Chloë Sevigny, Tanabadee Chokpikultong, Shawn Ashmore, & Ian Roberts.

There are a couple things that make this film feel like part of the If These Walls Could Talk series. The hot topic issue (AIDS), the assemblage of incredible female leads (see above), and the three vignettes format (one placed in Canada, another in mainland China, and the third in South Africa) being the obvious points of comparison. But 3 Needles is complicated, and its message can’t be as neatly wrapped up as those TV movies’ clear-cut themes. While many critics have pointed that out while panning the film, I found it to be one its strengths. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

Strung together by Sister Hilde’s narration, a nun played by Olympia Dukakis in the last vignette, each story is a contemporary situation where AIDS has been staggeringly mishandled due to emotion, fear, and a fundamental lack of knowledge about the disease, which is never mentioned by name in the film. In the first, a very pregnant Jin Ping (Lucy Liu) has set up an illegal blood collection service in a Chinese village, claiming she is a representative of the government pooling together a blood supply for local hospitals. With the promise of five yen for each donation, impoverished rice farmers, like Tong Sam (Tanabadee Chokpikultong), encourage their entire family to donate. And although Jin Ping tries to run the cleanest possible operation, there are flaws, which cause a full-blown localized epidemic. As town after town is enveloped by mysterious deaths, Tong Sam connects the dots and forces the government to take notice.

In Montreal, Denys (Shawn Ashmore), a smalltime porn star, fakes his monthly venereal disease tests in order to keep his job and support his dying father and waitress mother, knowing all the while he is infecting his hardcore porn costars. When he is found out, his mother (Stockard Channing) responds in the most bizarre and unexpected way (hint: it involves insurance fraud.) Meanwhile, Sister Clara (Chloë Sevigny), Sister Mary John (Sandra Oh), and Sister Hilde (Dukakis) have arrived in South Africa as missionaries to save the souls of their plantation charges, where the local folklore believes the only surefire way to get rid of a deadly illness is to have sex with a virgin. But after an infant is raped, Clara must decide between saving the souls of the dying as a nun and saving the bodies of the living in a double-edged agreement with the plantation owner.

With scores of subplots involving economic inequality, government and private responsibility, the cultural impact of religion, and so on, it’s easy to criticize the film for being muddled or for being somewhat confused about what it wants to say. But taking the If These Walls Could Talk series as an example, the issues and the messages are vastly different. How do you treat the subject of abortion as a supporter of abortion rights? You dramatize the positives of abortion rights. But how do you take on how people perceive and treat AIDS the world over? It’s complicated. And similarly, this is a complicated, ambitious film.

With that out of the way, the acting is fantastic. It’s almost pointless to name names, but Chloë Sevigny gives a particularly strong turn as novice nun Clara. It’s certainly one of the actress’ more evocative performances and perhaps the most engrossing of all the female leads in the film (though this may be because the camera spends more time with Clara than any other character, save Tong Sam). Her decisions, her dealings with the indifferent plantation owner, and her religious questioning are all handled with skill and subtlety. (She also can claim one of the film’s most beautiful sequences, in which Clara soundlessly stalks a herd of grazing giraffes that stand and stare at her in all her initial naiveté.)

Writer/director/producer Thom Fitzgerald’s script is colloquial and avoids heavy-handedness of dialogue and plot. But what was left unmentioned previously is the incredible amount of suffering characters face on top of AIDS. In addition to the beatings, murders, and all manner of alarming behavior, I have never seen a film with more rape (and so many different kinds of rape) than I did in these two hours – nuns, infants, pregnant women being violated with intentional infection, and that’s just the beginning of the list. No matter what the message, there is a level of unnecessary violence that even the most open-minded of critics can agree is distasteful. Zachary Jones
December 1, 2006