3 Women (1977)

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Director: Robert Altman

Screenplay: Robert Altman

Cast: Shelley Duvall as Mildred "Millie" Lammoreaux, Sissy Spacek as Mildred "Pinky" Rose, Janice Rule as Willie Hart, Robert Fortier as Edgar Hart, Ruth Nelson as Mrs. Rose, John Cromwell as Mr. Rose, Sierra Pecheur as Ms. Bunweil

In a period of great stress, his wife going through a major illness and in a hard period of his own career, Robert Altman had a dream. His dream, produced by 20th Century Fox, would be set in the desert community of Palm Springs, California, all within a world isolated by vast dusty desert road coloured pronominally yellow with the additional boldness of mid seventies decor, where an apartment block can have purple sage railings and a character befittingly nicknamed Pinky (Sissy Spacek) weats bold pink.

Pinky is a new employee at a health spa for the elderly, who is at times incredibly childish or frankly alien, attaching herself to Millie (Shelley Duvall), a waif-like figure who at first seems to be a popular sociable figure until you realise she is a figure who talks constantly in a world of her own with no one else listening, an incredibly isolated figure not particularly liked who gains most of her knowledge of the world from magazines. Theirs is a curious relationship, but as is their world. A place of a languid melancholy, Altman shoots the film in a hazy state as Millie becomes aware of her disconnect whilst Pinky is visibly stealing pieces of her personality, even if it is by accident due to an incident at the apartment complex pool.

The title references three women mind, the third Willie Hart (Janice Rule), the pregnant wife of aging former stunt man Edgar (Robert Fortier), a buffoonish cad who, operating at Dodge City, a bar that looks like an old b-movie western set with an abandoned mini-golf course and everyone firing guns at a range at the back, is secretly having an affair with Millie and is eyeing up Pinky as well. Willie's one form of communication, the character only speaking at the ending, is peculiar mythological and sexual murals of female and male humanoids that, like the swimming pools, are the most reoccurring motifs onscreen.

3 Women's world is a curious one, stately and utterly banal but weirder as a result. Here is ordinary life, where Millie is obsessed with all the cooking recipes she finds in magazines than anything profound, store bought consumer food like squirty cheese a third reoccurring symbol of the film, all whilst Pinky is a literal chameleon in how she can change, from blowing bubbles in her drink to becoming a tempestuous glamorous figure as she becomes. The central figures, Duvall and Spacek are (not surprisingly) incredible in the film. The exact nature of the film, knowing Altman originally dreamt it and the final work is a creation of multiple sources, author Patricia Resnick and a lot of improvisation from the central actresses themselves, is subjective to an extreme in the sense that the film really does not play out as anything but a very subdued character piece for its length, scrutinising these figures, alongside characters like Willie and Edgar, through the contemplative nature that was Altman's specialty.

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David Lynch has possibly seen the film, which is something I can make a promise on, noticeable when Pinky's parents are meet, two exceptionally old people whose flat pronunciations on bland things, like a sign for the kitchen they get her as a gift whilst she is in a coma, feels like a prototype for the state of perverse normalcy that Lynch tapped into. Noticeably it's to question whether they are even her parents; as with everything else in the film, entirely subjective, even if it feels part of the habit of Pinky's to try to reject her past life, a Mildred to match Duvall's Mildred who also prefers a nickname, there's a deliberate obfuscation of what it of truth without ever becoming un-natural in tone.

Ultimately a great deal of the film, barring one nightmare sequence, is entirely grounded in a reality that has been made abstract the moment one of Pinky's new co-workers is revealed to be one of two female twins, as much done to deliberately catch the viewer off guard at the beginning of the film as her. Unlike Images (1972), another of the Altman productions which was more overtly surreal in as a psychological horror, the mannered tone at hand in 3 Women is even stranger.

The sense of dream logic is from how the film, as well as with mind to Altman's trademarks in improvisation and grounded characterisation, never follows the plot outline I've suggested as to where you'd expect it. What happens to Pinky and Millie is not what you expect, instead the titular three women morphing completely. It's a curious experience, also a wonderful one, a distillation of American drama slowed down enough to be truly weird. Even the abstract score, by Bodhi Wind, has a calmed quality of disruption based on woodwind instruments, a quiet dissonant quality appropriate for the content.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Psychodrama

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Personal Opinion:

Something very different because of how, on the surface, 3 Women follows known of the conventional trademarks of an "abstract" film; instead it finds that, when the drama is hovering over a plot which is vague, where the characters seem to shift into one another, and even without its origins from an actual dream, a sense that the film is entirely inside its protagonists' head (or an outside figure's dreaming all this for us) without telegraphing it is just as strange to witness. Its argubly sad that, in his prolific career, Robert Altman didn't make many films like this in his career; thankfully, there are at least a few that, whilst not necessarily going to be like 3 Women, are all potentially weird in their own right.

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