by SARAH ROWLAND

Shoving Jesus down people’s throats is only going to get you so far in the fight against AIDS. Material wealth is a futile pursuit. Forgiveness is a virtue. With such painfully obvious lessons already worked into 3 Needles, the last thing we need is Olympia Dukakis spelling them out in a voiceover like she’s reading to a Sunday school class. Not only is it patronizing, but it comes dangerously close to ruining the impact of Thom Fitzgerald’s ambitious premise, in which The Hanging Garden director weaves a trio of concurrent narratives about the HIV pandemic.

In South Africa, Clara (Chloë Sevigny) is a novice nun who, along with two other sisters (Sandra Oh and Dukakis), is on a mission to convert the people living in a diseased, seaside slum before their souls are condemned to purgatory. But it doesn’t take long for the rebellious Clara to figure out that her true calling is not to save the dying from damnation, but to help save the living from death. To do this, she is forced to whore herself in some ungodly ways.

Meanwhile in Montreal, there’s Denny (Shawn Ashmore), a porn star who dodges HIV tests so that he can keep earning bread to support his dying father and aged mother (Stockard Channing, who gives the best performance in the whole film). Though horrified at first, Denny’s mom eventually finds it in her heart to forgive her misguided son and returns the favour with a pretty big sacrifice of her own.

And in China, Jin Ping (Lucy Liu) cruises China’s countryside inadvertently wiping out one village at a time. Posing as a government official and using unsanitized equipment, she sets up shop in farming communities for a few months and collects blood to sell on the black market. For their efforts, donors are rewarded with a whopping five bucks, a huge sum for desperate farmers like Tong Sam (Tanabadee Chokpikultong, who makes a heartbreaking debut).

The overseas plotlines are beautifully shot and each story is engaging enough, but every time Dukakis starts blathering on about how “everyday saints walk among us,” all you can think is, “Would someone please shut her the hell up?”

3 Needles opens Friday, April 14

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