In his latest film, 360, Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) builds up a cyclical, meandering narrative in a way reminiscent of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu?s Babel (2006). The film links together a series of vaguely interconnected characters whose lives are not only linked by tenuous degrees of separation, but also by the way they desperately seek sex and connectedness.
We begin inVienna, with an alluring and disturbing meeting between a Slovakian girl, Mirka (Lucia Siposova) and an Austrian pimp, who is photographing her for his high class escort business. Mirka?s story then glides into that of her first client, British businessman Michael Daly (Jude Law), whose rendezvous with the escort is interrupted by some clients who find out his dirty little secret. Then we?re off toLondon, where Michael?s wife Rose (Rachel Weisz) is trying to end her affair with a strapping Brazilian photographer. When the photographer?s girlfriend, Alina (Danica Jurcova), leaves him over the affair, we follow her on the transatlantic flight toDenverwhere she meets an older man on the flight (Anthony Hopkins) who has been searching for his daughter who disappeared years before. The pair gets stranded in theDenverairport, and Alina meets Tyler (Ben Foster), a recently released sex offender on his way back to Louisville.
Round and round we go, skipping in between the stories and then cross-cutting between them, creating a thatch work of modern love and relationship angst. There are a few other stories, including one involving a French-Algerian dentist and his unrequited love of his married hygienist, and another that stitches up the circle: the hygienist?s husband bumping into Mirka?s sister on the street. Meirelles does a good job keeping all of these interconnections and individual stories lucid and interesting. And there?s an appeal in the movie merely as a voyeuristic travel piece. But the director also manages to leverage his locales, capturing their particular character? even the impersonal international airport ? and using them to inform the drama as much as the characters.
When we first meet Tyler, Meirelles? camera lingers over a sign at the prison that reads ?Sex Offenders Unit.? It plays as a joke; the sign is a label that might as well apply to every character in the film. Each is lost to his or her compulsions, the promise of happiness at the end of a long wading through desire. Some of the stories, particularly the subplot between the dentist and his hygienist, present an intriguing conflict of morals and desire. Other stories, such as Hopkins? world-wandering elderly father, feel half-formed, saved by a few flashes of the actor?s tremendous presence. I would have also liked more from the relationship between Michael and Rose, the film teasing out some of the unstated sexual tension simmering in a seemingly happy marriage, but finishing its inquiry like an open sentence.
Road imagery abounds in the movie, and a deceivingly superficial voice over speaks about finding the forks in life?s road and taking them, a dubious carpe diem-vision that has worked unevenly for the characters involved. The irony, then, is that the film?s controlling image, made explicit in the 360?s final vignette, is Vienna?s famous Ringstrasse, which makes a loop around the city. Ring roads don?t have forks, and all these characters, Meirelles seems to be telling us, are having trouble finding a way out. The problem is we have just as much difficulty finding a way in. If Meirelles? City of God drives straight to the dark, infectious heart of a living, breathing neighborhood, 360 remains aloof, hovering and circling, but never quite penetrating the heart of the matter.
Still, besides the scenery, the acting rings true (even when talents like Hopkins and Law are forced to deliver some hokey lines of dialogue). Ben Foster, in particular, turns in a quality, understated performance, his paroled convict battling sexual perversion like a druggy coming off heroin. Like drugs, in Meirelles? world, sex and attraction is alternately addicting and soothing, it offers a way out of misery or poverty and avenue towards a slipper slope to self-destruction. 360 is also a vision of the world as an actualization of telecommunications, our bodies flying through space like zeros and ones through a telephone line. Like that old AT&T commercial, we are urged to reach out and touch someone. Unfortunately, that?s all anyone can seem to do.
With all of its competing libidos, love feels pushed out of this cycle of intrigue. No wonder, then, in all of it, Mirka seems the most at home and reasonable in this ensemble of characters ? shirking off sex as work, divorcing it of its emotional content, and making out like a bandit.
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