3 Needles

Did you know they had AIDS in China? It must be a closely guarded secret. However, in the first of three stories on the disease, we see Lucy Liu as a blood smuggler who buys blood for $5.00 a pint. In the process, a whole village becomes infected. It is a sad tale punctuated by her delivery of her baby alone in a field.

It then moves to Canada where a porn actor (Shawn Ashmore) steals blood from his father to hide his infection. After one of the required tests, the technician comes on the set to tell him his blood test shows that he has been dead for some time. He rushes home to find that his father was dead when he drew the blood. His mother (Stockard Channing) comes up with a solution to their problems that is quite original, and probably only possible in Canada.

The final segment involves some nuns in Africa. Olympia Dukakis, Sandra Oh, and Chloë Sevigny are sent to save souls before AIDS takes them to purgatory. The opening segment of the movie really didn't make any sense until now. It fits into this segment. I wonder why they didn't put it here. Maybe they didn't want to distract from Sevigny's naughty nun bit.

Sevigny is a novice that sees her mission as more than saving souls; she also tries to save lives. She involves the other nuns and they swipe money from the collection plate, but she goes way further. The plantation owner (Ian Roberts) wants tit for tat to help her. We did get to see her tit, and he got the tat more than once. Is that what God wanted her to do? Is saving lives just as important as saving souls, and is some sin allowed for the greater good? The cinematography in the film was incredible, and the music was also excellent.

Here is another film of which I knew nothing that - thanks to the recommendation of my video service - has brought two intensely entertaining and thought-provoking hours to my life. It comprises three tales of the worldwide AIDS epidemic each unique and impressive.

The first takes place in rural China where Lucy Liu plays Jin Ping - a woman who is a black-marketeer of blood products. She and her partners prey upon residents of small villages who are basically ignorant of the complexities and dangers involved in donating blood. The villagers are poor, and the promise of much-needed funds is the bait used by Jin Ping. A farmer who is unable to give blood uses his daughter as the donor in order to make a better life for his family. The farmer and his daughter are played by two extraordinary Chinese actors who bring humor and - in the end - great pathos to their parts. In this first of the three parts the film shows ruin and death brought to an entire village through greed and apathy.

The second tale narrower in scope but is the most fascinating of the three. It takes place in French-Canada and revolves around a porn star and his family. Stockard Channing plays the mother in what is one of the strangest and most fascinating roles I have ever seen. To tell more would spoil the film for anyone who might view it, but I can assure you that Channing has accomplished something special in her portrayal of a mother's reaction to the illness of her son.

The third story in the film stars Olympia Dukakis, Chloë Sevigny, and Sandra Oh as nuns who travel to Africa to assist at a clinic. They become involved in various ways with the workers and the large agricultural company for which most of the local villagers work. In this third tale the scenery is so beautiful and impressive that it is almost beyond comprehension. The viewer is struck that within all of this natural beauty, lurks a deadly disease destroying the population.

In most films in which the driving theme is the destructiveness of AIDS, you would expect to see at least some characters who are gay men. There is not one gay person in this film. That very fact enhances the film's powerful message that this epidemic is not one confined to a small segment of society but to the world's civilization as a whole. If you wish to observe disease, religion, avarice, politics, love, hate and still be thoroughly entertained, I recommend 3 Needles.

I was fortunate to see the director's cut of this film at the DC Filmfest. The audience was privileged to have the director, Thom Fitzgerald, make an unannounced visit and stay for questions afterwards.

3 Needles is three separate stories how AIDS spread in China, Africa, and the United States.

I found it a bit confusing to begin with some African scenes and then jump to the China story. I think this was to allow the narrator to introduce and to end the movie. The narrator was Olympia Dukakis and she had a part in the African story.

Lucy Liu led an outstanding cast in the story of its spread to China. Until this film, I did not realize that China had an AIDS epidemic. The movie shows how AIDS was spread through blood collection stations throughout rural China. China's vast rural population was perfect for exploitation. They were isolated; they needed the money; it took a long time to associate entire villages dying with the helpful blood collector.

The US story is somewhat familiar to us. A male porn star spreads it knowingly due to his greed. What makes this story unique is how Stockard Channing handles the discovery that her son is not only a porn star, but is dying. She educates herself on the disease and discovers a breed of vultures buying up the insurance policies of AIDS victims (viaticum companies) hedging their bets that purchasing a $2M policy for $1M will double their investment. She sets out to give herself AIDS and sell her insurance policy. What she does with the proceeds is the controversial part.

The African story reveals the director's Roman Catholic roots. One wishes that Sandra Oh had a larger part in this story. Chloe Sevigny is wonderful as a dedicated nun who chooses to submit to the local plantation owner (sorry, don't remember the African name for plantation) in order to get revenge / punishment on an adult male who has raped a young young virginal child in order to rid himself of the AIDS virus. As with the others, this story shows the many facets of this disease and the difficulty in assigning blame for its spread or for how people handle it.

Each of the stories has an odd element of humor to it. At times, I found it inappropriate for the subject, but perhaps that is also the message: we can laugh despite the hardships. I saw the director's cut, I wonder if this will be removed / downplayed in the cut that's released.

The cinematography is beautiful and sweeping in both Asia and Africa. The US scenes manage to show a true grit feeling.

Kudos to the director for assembling a really outstanding set of actors. Outstanding performances from Lucy Liu, the father-daughter team from the China story and Ian Roberts (the plantation owner).

I saw this last night and just can't stop thinking about it. This film is off-the-charts audacious in its blend of tragedy and dark humor, with cinematography that ranges from powerfully beautiful (the South African sequences reminded me of John Ford movies like "The Searchers"), to a seedy quality that subtly conveys the weirdness of its humor and unethical qualities of its characters. The film also never flinches from showing us such taboos as male nudity and the indignities of a terminally ill man. Like the movie "Babel," this movie contains three stories, two of which are set in far-off lands, all dealing with complex issues and tragic ignorance.

The first story is about how practically an entire village in China acquires AIDS due to poverty-driven greed. The film's edge is in how it turns the tables on us psychologically; the people are not what they seem, and greed is not always clear-cut when it is a basic means of survival. The second story is a strange tale of a mother who handles the death of her husband and 'acceptance' of the fact that her son has AIDS in a way that leaves the viewer extremely perplexed and uncomfortable, which is actually a good thing. This film doesn't flinch from showing us AIDS stories we don't want to believe, such as those people who purposefully acquire it. It mixes dark humor with beautiful metaphors, such as the mother driving her sports car into an enormous pile of red leaves, until she's practically buried in it. The final seconds of that story leave a chilling print embedded on one's brain; what is this woman thinking?? The third story juggles a whole range of issues regarding ignorance, religion, greed, selfishness and selflessness, and balances them all on a head of a pin. One false move and the story would have come off as preachy or exploitational. Again, there is an iconic scene that stays indelibly in my mind; the beautiful and horrific sight of a woman's dead body lying under a thin blanket of mud.

The entire film does has some rough edges, which may at first put some viewers off. I found Olympia Dukakis' narration a bit difficult to accept at the beginning of the movie (during a strange and fascinating African ritual of male circumcision), but it all comes together by the very end - in fact, quite powerfully. The film also jumps back and forth in past and present, which may at times seem confusing, but the ultimate effect makes us reread our initial assumptions. And the first film in particular is quite slow, although again, I think there was a point to its languorous pace. We all know that the disease in question in this film is AIDS, but the location used in China is so rural that one feels that the time period could be any time in the past fifty years. In fact the circumcision scene at the beginning of the film makes one unaware of even what century we are witnessing! That I think, is the director Thom Fitzgerald's genius. I read a review that criticized this movie for not mentioning the word AIDS, which actually I was unaware of. But the fact is; this movie could be about any disease, as even the Chinese initial reaction to SARS was one of denial. This film does certainly illustrate the stigma associated with AIDS, but the fallout is much deeper than sexual practices in developing countries. The reason it has spread, as this film so eloquently shows, is not because of people's sex lives; it's spread because of ignorance, poverty, superstition, fear and greed. If we can just focus on fighting those battles, then maybe … maybe we can win.

There is a lot of sadness in this film artfully rendered, and a measure of grace too, which feels hard-earned. The writer-director Thom Fitzgerald, at the NY screening, said that the reality he encountered while researching it was probably even worse than he could bear to show. (Amazingly, the renowned Dr. David Ho was also present at the screening, which added another hopeful touch: HIV/AIDS progress is being made but, as the film shows, funding and education are still lacking in poor countries, and attitudes are often still messed up in rich ones.) There is a didactic purpose in 3 Needles, but fortunately Fitzgerald has the storytelling skills and the director's talent to bear the load. You may not buy everything in it, and you may be angry at him for some of the tough images and choices, but the human emotion and pain, the weakness and strength are gripping and undeniable. And many of the secondary observations, about characters and place, feel sharp and well-observed.

The prologue is a perfect example of a warm, vibrant image giving way to a shocking one: Teenage boys of an African tribe cover their bodies with a pale paste, un-self-consciously helping each other, though they are naked. It is an ancient ritual and they appear eager, joking around but purposeful. Later they are to be circumcised, the passageway into becoming men. The image of the knife, for reasons which will be instantly clear, is uniquely jolting. Surprisingly the movie manages to sustain the intensity, asking questions while shining a light on different corners of the world.

The acting and cinematography are uniformly good, the latter especially considering the low budget. Most of the South Africans were non-actors, including tribespeople who had never even seen a film. Fitzgerald called this version "the director's cut" since his Canadian distributor previously showed a much different version which cut several scenes, and jumbled the stories together. This might have made sense in another movie, but with the stories on 3 different continents, this version, with each played discretely, seemed much better. Also, Fitzgerald said he shot a 4th scenario which he cut, probably for length. See this on the big screen and it will very likely stay with you.