>>REVIEW
3 NEEDLES
STARRING Chloe Sevigny, Shawn Ashmore, Lucy Lui and Sandra Oh
DIRECTED BY Thom Fitzgerald
Now playing
The Plaza
The vignette film is a tricky business. Done well, its separate stories complement and inform one another, creating a whole out of disparate parts. Done poorly, they are the scattershot ramblings of a poor storyteller.
Falling squarely in the former, writer-director Thom Fitzgerald’s 3 Needles is an unfortunate attempt to mash three AIDS narratives into a single, globe-spanning conversation piece for tongue-clucking, middle-class audiences.
Following, in no particular sequence or connection, the lives of a Chinese farmer (Tanabadee Chokpikultong), a novice nun in an African mission (Chloe Sevigny), and a Montreal porn star (Shawn Ashmore), 3 Needles is a two-hour mash-up of three short films that should have been allowed to breathe separately. While Fitzgerald makes a few cursory nods to segue, the film’s narratives are each entirely self-contained, save for a trite and contrived conclusion by narrator Olympia Dukakis that gently pats the audience on the head and explains that they were all stories intercepted by a deceased nun on the way to heaven.
God save us all.
From the Chinese army rolling up its sleeves to harvest the grieving Chokpikultong’s rice field (lacking only an inspirational ’80s musical montage) to a pathetically weak chastisement of one of Sevigny’s parishioners after he has raped a child – the film masquerades under the pretence that its disparate stories actually create some kind of cohesiveness. Instead, by jumping from micro-narrative to micro-narrative, Fitzgerald creates shallow characters who gloss over what could otherwise be genuinely compelling stories. Even the film’s explicit visual references to the horrors of its world are shallow, with a screaming Lucy Lui birthing a child in a rice paddy, tearing its umbilical cord with her teeth – all without a single drop of blood to be seen. Steering clear of this kind of visceral sensationalism might be forgiven if the film actually allowed itself to pierce its underdeveloped characters with any kind of depth.
Together with its unremarkable cinematography, rendering what would otherwise be gorgeous landscapes into generic, washed-out shots, 3 Needles is a perfect example of vignette filmmaking gone awry. |
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