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Last Updated: May 30th, 2008 - 11:49:13 |
In the world of “Three Needles,” a fable-like meditation on the AIDS pandemic premiering on Showtime Dec. 4, the deadly disease is not couched in terms of science, medicine, or morality. What comes subtly through the text is how money—primarily the lack of it, the want of it for survival—pushes three communities into the deadly grasp of the virus.
A coastal village in South Africa is the setting for one of the three stories told and narrated omnisciently by a nun sent there to oversee two novices at a Catholic mission. While the nun Hilde (Olivia Dukakis) is focused on the mission of saving souls in a country with such a high death rate, one of her young novices Clara (Chlöe Sevigny) commits herself to the survival of five orphans after their parents and grandmother have died.
More than the other three settings, in Canada and China, the South African locale has less emphasis on the African people struggling and dying from AIDS. Instead, the focus is on the good-hearted nuns and the wealthy White owner of a plantation where one-quarter of the impoverished workforce has the virus. In comparison to the close-up portraits of the indigenous people painted in other countries, this lack of emphasis is very noticeable and keeps us at a distance from the Black population, especially in light of South Africa’s depicted incidence of sexual assault of virgins, mistakenly viewed by some men as a cure for AIDS. Despite this emotional distance, director-writer Thom Fitzgerald tells such an engaging tale, shot in such a way to take advantage of the haunting landscape, that it is impossible to not be drawn to it.
In China, a pregnant woman (Lucy Liu) negotiates a treacherous path as a blood smuggler when she learns that her business may be spreading the HIV virus to unsuspecting villagers eager to earn $5 for donating blood. One struggling farmer, too ill to donate blood himself, volunteers his daughter to give blood even though she is too young to be a donor. Happy to have enough money to plant a generous rice crop and buy an ox, the farmer overlooks his child’s growing fatigue and the illness of many of his neighbors. His predicament is very moving and Lucy Liu is stunning as a woman in the developing world forced to make it in the best way that she can.
In the third location, Canada, a young porn actor Denys (Shawn Ashmore) is living at home with his parents, a seriously ill father and a mother who scrapes by as a waitress. Denys’s horrible secret is that he has been cheating on his blood tests, required for those in the porn industry, to check for sexually transmitted diseases. When he is caught and his HIV-positive status is revealed, his life and the life of his family are irrevocably changed—and then it changes again in a very unexpected way.
All the stories in “3 Needles” are troubling and raw but they are not cheap and do not take any easy ways out. In a seriously way, they depict the issue of death on a global scale—and how it easily it begins with the little things that we frail humans do each day.
“Three Needles” opens in limited release on Dec. 1 for Wordl AIDS Day and premieres on Showtime Dec. 4 at 9 p.m.
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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