New York Times - December 1, 2006
Stephen Holden

Had it taken a more hard-headed approach, "3 Needles," written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald ("The Hanging Garden"), a New York-born filmmaker based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, might have been to the AIDS epidemic what "Traffic" was to the drug trade.

Its moony poeticism is underscored by the sporadic narration of Olympia Dukakis, who plays a nun in the last of the movie's three stories. Her character, Sister Hilde, a missionary working in South Africa, delivers the movie's summary benediction: a rambling, eccentric message from the great beyond that makes the film's closing note of cosmic compassion ring painfully flat. Before that, the tone of the movie gyrates wildly: mystical one minute, smirking with a weird gallows humor the next.

But when it bothers to screw in the nuts and bolts of its vignettes, "3 Needles" evokes a sorrowful vision of the world in which AIDS (the word is never heard in the film) advances because of human frailty. The cinematography (by Thomas M. Harting) is also splendidly panoramic, in the mode of Claire Denis's "Beau Travail."

All three tales illustrate how ignorance, greed, fear and superstition have fed the epidemic.

The film, which uses five languages - English, Mandarin, Xhosi, French and Afrikaans - begins with a prologue, a tribal initiation rite in which African boys are led into a forest and circumcised to mark their passage into manhood. It then embarks on a circuitous global trek that leaps from China to Canada (Montreal) and back to Africa (in a different setting from the prologue).

In rural China Jin Ping (Lucy Liu), a blood smuggler, ventures into the backwaters, where she pays impoverished farmers $5 a pint to donate. In one village Tong Sam (Tanabadee Chokpikultong), who grows rice, is rejected as a donor because he has the flu, and insists that his young daughter donate in his stead. The girl, along with everybody else in the village who gives blood, soon sickens and dies.

The story omits essential information about blood smuggling and the transmission of H.I.V. through unsterilized needles, instead taking a pointless melodramatic sidetrack in which Jin Ping is raped by policemen while on the road and later gives birth, unattended in a field.

In the ghoulish second story, Denys (Shawn Ashmore), a Canadian pornography actor, conceals his H.I.V.-positive status from his producers by substituting blood drawn from his dying father for his own in required tests. When his mother, Olive (Stockard Channing), a hard-bitten waitress from whom Denys has concealed his occupation, discovers what he does, she concocts an insurance fraud scheme involving tainted blood taken from her son while he's asleep.

The final vignette, which lifts "3 Needles" to a spiritual plane, follows Sister Hilde and two novices, Sister Clara (Chlo Sevigny) and Sister Mary John (Sandra Oh), as they work among farmers on the coast of South Africa. Sister Clara becomes attached to a family of orphaned children, one of whom is sickened by a folk cure. When she seeks help from a white Afrikaans plantation owner (Ian Roberts) who eyes her hungrily, he makes her a diabolical offer. Although this episode involves Roman Catholicism and condom distribution and the folk myth that sex with a virgin is a cure for AIDS, the issues are glossed over.

For all its gaping crevices and dangling threads, "3 Needles" sustains a mood of sorrowful gravity, bolstered by some powerful performances, especially Ms. Channing's blowzy waitress and Ms. Sevigny's luminous novice. Ms. Sevigny has played so many sullen, shifty-eyed rebels that her radiance in "3 Needles" speaks more eloquently about human goodness than any words delivered from on high.

3 NEEDLES

Opens today in New York; Los Angeles; Pasadena, Palm Springs and San Francisco, Calif.; Chicago; and Boston.

Written (in English, Mandarin, Xhosi, French and Afrikaans, with English subtitles) and directed by Thom Fitzgerald; director of photography, Thomas M. Harting; edited by Susan Shanks; music by Christophe Beck and Trevor Morris; production designer, Fran ois Laplante; produced by Mr. Fitzgerald and Bryan Hofbauer; released by Wolfe Releasing. In Manhattan at the Village East, Second Avenue at 12th Street, East Village. Running time: 127 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Shawn Ashmore (Denys), Stockard Channing (Olive), Olympia Dukakis (Sister Hilde), Lucy Liu (Jin Ping), Sandra Oh (Sister Mary John), Chlo Sevigny (Sister Clara), Tanabadee Chokpikultong (Tong Sam) and Ian Roberts (Hallyday).

061201
NYT061203