Beyond the Multiplex

"The Architect": Depressed suburbanites meet downtrodden city-dwellers, neglect to turn on lights
Speaking as a connoisseur of espresso-depresso cinema, I must say that I found Matt Tauber's worthy and conscientious new urban drama "The Architect" a little heavy on the depresso without enough espresso. This film is adapted from a play by Scottish writer David Greig, set in (one presumes) either Edinburgh or Glasgow, and the attempt to transplant it to North America may account for its sense of rootless anomie. The fine ensemble is headed by Anthony LaPaglia, Isabella Rossellini and Viola Davis, but all three of them seem bummed out about the glum, constricted, melodramatic narrative they're locked into.

Davis provides the most powerful performance here, which is especially impressive when you consider that her character, a Chicago public-housing resident turned activist named Tonya, verges on tooth-achingly virtuous black-lady stereotype for much of the picture. Tonya lives in an appalling housing complex designed years ago by Leo Waters (LaPaglia), a Le Corbusier acolyte who's unable to face the collapse of his towers-in-a-park dream into a crime-ridden nightmare zone. She wants Leo to join with the activists who want the towers razed and the site redesigned; he of course refuses.

Tauber has to gradually bring this mismatched couple -- the arrogant white intellectual and the single-mom African-American striver -- back to some kind of meeting place. Meanwhile he makes clear that Leo's life in his lovely suburban home is no less dysfunctional in its own way than Tonya's existence in the towers. His wife (Rossellini, completely wasted) is drifting off into mental illness, his daughter is pursuing a potential career as a truck-stop hooker, and his teenage son is having a sexual identity crisis, aided by a poor kid from (of course) the very housing project that Tonya lives in.

It's a compact and symmetrical picture with all its plot points in the right places, but I never found it convincing in the slightest. Sebastian Stan has moving moments as Leo's son, and I almost wished the movie was about him (and his would-be ghetto lover, played by Paul James) rather than questing so formulaically for meaning on a larger scale. LaPaglia, an actor of considerable range and gifts, seems dyspeptic and unhappy throughout this role. May he choose better next time.

"The Architect" opens in New York, Los Angeles and other major markets Dec. 1. Also available on many cable systems via HDNet, with DVD release to follow.

"3 Needles": People all over the world, contractin' HIV, rapin', killin' and actin' goofy
I guess treating a well-intentioned movie about the global AIDS epidemic disrespectfully is already offensive, but there's almost no way I can convey to you the weirdness and unpredictability of Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald's anthology film "3 Needles." I can't even exactly tell you that it's bad. Well, yeah, I can: It's pretty bad. But "3 Needles" is occasionally very effective and sometimes very funny, to go along with the moments where it's clueless or totally alarming.

Here's what we've got: Three not-really-connected seriocomic anecdotes about violence, cruelty, manipulation and criminal misbehavior, all illustrating the insidious ways people spread HIV to each other. In one, Lucy Liu plays an unscrupulous blood-bank operator in rural China, infecting entire villages with dirty needles. She's the heroine of this segment, more or less. She gets raped by soldiers when she's nine months pregnant (in one of the movie's opening scenes).

In another, Shawn Ashmore plays a Montreal porn star who suspects he's HIV-positive, so he steals blood from his dying father to pass the tests he needs to take to keep working. When his dad dies and his mom (Stockard Channing) learns the truth about her son's career and viral status, she buys a whopping new insurance policy, intentionally infects herself with HIV, and then cashes in the insurance so the two of them can live in luxury. This entire segment is played as zany comedy -- Dad's bilingual Quebecois funeral, and Mom's insistence on screwing skeezy guys without condoms -- right up to the moment when Ashmore's character meets a former costar in a restaurant and she accuses him of killing her.

Then there's a section with Chloë Sevigny, Sandra Oh and Olympia Dukakis as a trio of cute, salty, kinda sexy nuns out of some '50s movie, on a mission in southern Africa. Some of this is played for laughs too, but there's also the dastardly plantation owner with lascivious designs on Sister Chloë and the local superstition that the way to get rid of HIV is to pass it along to a virgin, which in practice means raping little girls. It turns out that the super-well-intentioned doctors who pal around chastely with the nuns have all along been using dirty needles the locals scavenge from the garbage, repackage, and sell them over and over again.

It's impossible not to admire the breadth of vision and ambition at work in "3 Needles." Fitzgerald is unafraid of trying to combine hilarity with horrifying, jaw-dropping tragedy. It sometimes produces moments of unexpected power. It also produces a bizarre and fatally uneven movie, veering from black comedy to utter stupidity to maudlin religiosity, which seems to have been made in total defiance of both narrative conventions and emotional logic.

"3 Needles" opens Dec. 1 in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Palm Springs, Calif., and San Francisco, with more cities to follow.

"Highway Courtesans": Inside India's "prostitute caste"
It wouldn't be right not to mention Mystelle Brabbée's extraordinary documentary "Highway Courtesans," shot over the course of nine years among the Bachara community of central India, where by tradition the oldest daughter (and often the younger ones too) support their families through prostitution. She follows three young women, the sisters Guddi and Shana and their vivacious neighbor, Sangita, as they grow up into this tradition (officially abhorred but still thriving in practice), turning tricks for truck drivers along the Delhi-Calcutta highway.

What's amazing about this is not the unstinting, fair-minded portraits of these girls' lives, and the complex social and familial pressures that push them into "the profession" (as everybody calls it), although those details are captured in outstanding clarity. It's that Guddi dares to defy her parents and the tradition, seeks out an education, leaves the profession behind and begins to develop her own ideas about gender, society and her own individual future. Shana and Sangita seem conflicted about this metamorphosis, both proud of Guddi and a little abashed that they aren't following suit. Not many documentaries about poverty in the developing world are so hopeful; you can't help wondering what Brabbée's camera will find among the Bachara in another decade.

"Highway Courtesans" opens Dec. 1 at the Quad Cinema in New York, with more engagements and DVD release to follow.

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