Jamie passion and passionfruit!

This triptych of short films featuring three great directors is as uneven as you get.  The first film, The Dangerous Thread of Things,  by Michelangelo Antonioni is full of nubile young things but is completely laughable and has the worst script and acting I’ve seen for ages.  A complete disaster.  Number two, Equilibrium, by Steven Soderbergh has a nice starting point, the therapy session in which the patient’s problem is secondary to the psychologists interest in spying on something across the street.  Alan Arkin is good as the shrink and we get to see the mature Robert Downey Junior as the patient.  But for all its promise, it goes virtually nowhere and is self-conscious.  Nice black and white photography.  Number three, The Hand by Wong Kar Wai is a small gem of a picture concerning the attachment between a prostitute and an apprentice tailor over a series of years culminating in 1963.  Gong Li is magnificent as usual, Chang Chen is also great but the beauty of the film is in the simplicity of the story, the choice of scenes, the excellent camera angles which show us just enough, Chris Doyle’s rainy grainy photography and a beautiful roundness make it a first class piece of film making.

And Eros?  Not so much of it in any of the films.  Wrong title but a good excuse for some attractive graphics and Caetano Veloso singing in Italian.

¶¶¶¶+ (for The Hand) ¶ for the rest