3 Needles

Starring Chloíƒ « Sevigny, Lucy Liu, and Stockard Channing. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, April 21, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

If they gave out Oscars for sheer ambition, 3 Needles would rack up fistfuls of golden statuettes. Set in rural China, old Montreal, and South Africa's isolated Wild Coast, writer-director Thom Fitzgerald's sweeping film captures the complexity of the spread of AIDS around the globe. It's breathtakingly shot and often moving, but his three-part study is sometimes as sprawling as the epidemic itself.

Nova Scotia's Fitzgerald, hailed for his 1997 hit, The Hanging Garden, links his triumvirate of pain with themes of sainthood and martyrdom. By far the most powerful and fully explored story line follows novice nun Clara (Chloíƒ « Sevigny), who is sent to an isolated outpost of Africa to help "save" people dying of AIDS. But she soon gets caught up in trying to help the living, in particular an orphaned family, and faces bartering her soul to do so. In her crisp white habit, Clara is like an alien amid the dung huts and crashing surf, but Sevigny gives her just enough ambiguity and street toughness to overcome any pious Sound of Music stereotypes.

Equally fascinating, but not as fleshed out, is the story of Tong Sam (Tanabadee Chokpikultong), a Chinese farmer who encourages his wife and child to sell blood to black marketeer Jin Ping (Lucy Liu) to earn money for his rice field. The third, and smallest, vignette seems almost an afterthought by comparison, although Stockard Channing is emotionally involving as a poor French-Canadian mother who does the unthinkable to help her son (Shawn Ashmore), a down-and-out, HIV-infected porn actor.

The messages and meanings are too numerous to run down here. Poverty, for one, plays a recurring role in the spread of AIDS: Liu's hugely pregnant blood runner, for instance, may cut corners, but she's trying to support a huge family and a sick husband.

Every frame is like a perfectly composed photograph, whether it's Clara, her wimple fluttering in the wind, watching a herd of giraffes in the long grass or thousands of dragonflies buzzing over lime-green rice paddies.

Fitzgerald struggles to harness his pieces together with strained narration by Olympia Dukakis's older nun-stoically spoken and pretentiously written meditations on everything from sainthood to mortality. The voice-over makes 3 Needles seem irritatingly self-important, in one distracting device, reverentially referring to AIDS only as The Virus.

Still, Fitzgerald infuses his stories with enough compassion to counteract his affectations. Part of the appeal of 3 Needles is just in watching him try to wrangle onto celluloid an epidemic so confounding that, two decades after it entered the public consciousness, it continues to mutate its way across the most desperate corners of the planet.

Comments