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Synopsis: A drama that visits
rural China, a plantation in South Africa, and Montreal's porn
industry, to tell three separate yet universal stories, rooted
to struggles with the HIV pandemic. In China, Ping is a pregnant
young woman running a black market blood collection scam that
creates a mini epidemic in a rural village. In Montreal, Denys
is a porn actor hiding his positive HIV status in order to
continue working and supporting his mother--who herself goes to
extreme lengths to provide for the family's future. And, in
Africa, Sister Clara is a young novice nun, driven to convert
the rapidly dying Africans to Catholicism before it's too late;
she makes a desperate bargain with a corrupt plantation owner to
help prevent the spread of HIV in the region, bringing two nuns,
who are of her same order, to accompany her on the journey |
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Review:
 I'm
not exactly sure what to call this thing. Is it a celebration of
AIDS? An exposé about how heterosexuals get the disease? An
attack on those who might profit from the disease, or
accidentally spread it through ignorance for malice?
This is an extremely ugly film. Even the selfless nuns in the
African portion of the trilogy of featurettes aren't that nice.
According to Sister Hilde Francis(Olympia Dukakis), who narrates
the three parts of the film, the nuns are there to convert the
Anglicans to Catholicism because that church isn't good enough.
 This
being a trilogy, we've got three multicultural stories: The
first takes place in Southern China, where a certain Jin
Ping(Lucy Liu) is running a blood drive and buying the red stuff
for five bucks US a pint. Soon, the entire village is rich,
everyone, that is except Tong Sam(Tanabadee Chokpikultong), who
had the flu and wasn't allowed. So he gets his daughter to sell
some blood.
All of a sudden everyone in the village is sick and soon all
are dying. Ping and her family high tail it out of there, and
even though Sam does his best to get the government involved,
they don't do very much.
Cut to Montreal, Quebec, where Denys Cowie (Shawn Ashmore), a
low-rent porn star living with his parents, and since he's HIV
positive, he has to steal samples of his father's(strangly
uncredited) blood in order to keep on having unprotected sex on
film. When the old man dies, our protagonist is found out,
leaving his mother Olive (Stockard Channing) with not enough
income to keep their lower middle class lifestyle going, so she
decides to scam the Canadian insurance industry.
In South Africa, where a sizable fraction of the population
has AIDS, three nuns go to tend the sick and save their souls
from Anglicanism. The situation is getting so bad that one of
them, Sister Clara (Chloë Sevigny), decides to do some venial
sins with the overseer of the local tea plantation(Ian Roberts),
to get him to agree to do some extra stuff in the area to build
the moral fiber of the locals, who are, in general, pathetic,
venial and disgusting, except for the little children, some of
whom are raped by local men as a cure for AIDS.
While the filmmakers try to bring a message of hope somewhere
within the stories, the real message is one of hopelessness.
Even those who do their best to help the situation, in fact make
it worse
The acting is good, but not genuinely great, and who wants to
see anything as hopeless and cynical as this? No wonder the
Canadians, who paid for the film, demanded that 20 minutes,
which have been restored, be excised. Don't bother.
Eric Lurio
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