lasttimeisaw
A strange fixation sprouts from Robert Altman's dream-inspired 3 WOMEN, an adolescent girl Pinky Rose (Spacek), newly hired to work at a spa facility for geriatrics in a desert town, California, intuitively she is engrossed with her colleague Millie (Duvall), both from Texas, and before soon, she becomes the latter's new roommate, like a dew-eyed doe, Pinky crazes about living together with Millie, and expects their friendship to bloom.But in reality Millie, who is lionised as "the perfect person in the world" by Pinky, is anything but a role-model, a reedy, fastidious, but ostensibly confident woman who has a propensity for incorrigible verbosity on trivialities, which is her defense mechanism against the inimical world, where no one gives a damn about her, from her frigid co-workers to prim spa doctors and her neighbors, uniformly they treat her like air, a laugh-stocking, she is a wallflower but her spirit is never dejected. So the sudden adulation from a meek Pinky seems ginger Millie up, although she doesn't exactly see eye to eye with the latter's ungainliness and naiveté. She brings Pinky to her haunt, a tavern and shooting range called Dodge City, owned by Edgar Hart (Fortier), a former cowpoke and his pregnant wife Willie (Rule), who constitutes the film's titular triad together with Pinky and Mille (3 women of different ages facing their crises. Interesting, in fact Spacek and Duvall are both born in 1949), and is often seen assiduously and taciturnly painting grotesque murals (courtesy of artist Bodhi Wind) of naked human-like creatures often pierced with violence, which has been eerily montaged and edited from a swimming pool to the spa populated with flabby fleshes in the film's striking opening sequence.A dividing line occurs when Pinky commits a suicidal attempt after being upbraided by a despairing Millie, who is willing to put out with the sleazy Edgar despite Pinky's dissent. When Pinky wakes up from her coma, her entire personality takes a sea change, repudiates her visiting parents (cameos from Golden Age director John Cromwell and his wife Ruth Nelson), refuses to be called as Pinky, but Mildred, her real name, which is also Millie's. Meanwhile Millie, apparently driven by guilt, capitulates to Pinky's whims, an about-face counter-move, only, it is galling for her to see that Pinky is doing much better in the front of getting guys' attention.That is where this torrid female-centered drama swerves into an oneiric realm of confusion, contradiction and angst (accentuated by a sterling constellations of re-arranged cut-ups), culminating in a stillborn-delivery flurry filtered through lens of surrealism (the eyes of a rapt Pinky), with a discombobulating coda seems to overthrow all the previous designations and align the three-women under the same roof, with a hint there is no man needed in their picture. Truth to be told, 3WOMEN is probably the most offbeat film among Altman's corpus (no complete script is produced and Duvall improvises most of her compulsive babbling), but it stimulates viewers with a piquant female-empowering awakening: consumed by their inherent disparities, united by their resilience, whether their roles are mother, lover or child, which stems from Altman's own deep sympathy and piercing insight towards the other sex, overtly, a nod to Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA (1966), and a further plumbing of perturbed female psyche after IMAGES (1972).Shelley Duvall, crowned BEST ACTRESS in Cannes, is indubitably emanating her career-best flair here, a self-consciously droll figure smoldering with low confidence, exasperation and vulnerability, which makes her Millie an authentic character, not because she is likable or sympathetic, but because of her characteristic ambiguity as a human being, that essence defines each and every individual who once sets foot on this planet, which ineffably strikes a chord under Altman's level- headed tutelage and through Duvall's unaffected interpretation. Sissy Spacek, fresh from her star- making bravura in Brian de Palma's CARRIE (1976), is equally electrifying with a carriage coalescing her Janus-faced transmogrification: a plain-looking ingénue and a lethally child-faced hussy. Janice Rule, whose Willie remains elusive and mythic due to her shortchanged screen-time and dialogue-free requirement, but whenever she is on-screen, she balances off Millie-Pinky's earthy pair with a tinge of uncanny mystique.Finally, a pat on composer Gerald Busby's back for his distinctively unsettling score, circulating and hovering like a primordial creature around the film's mundane and dispiriting setting, tantalizing clueless viewers with an open-ended psychological riddle which archly boost the sophistication of a human brain and its nocturnal secretion.
Brandon Quinn
Robert Altman's 3 WOMEN (1977) with Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek & Janice Rule, has remained my all-time favourite picture since I accidentally caught in on the Z-channel at 3 in the morning back when I was like 13... It remains Altman's least trademark work, filled with lots of non-sequitors, a very dream-like logic and structure, hints of surrealism, absurdism & devastating tragedy, one of the most original motion picture musical scores of all time (by Gerald Busby) and unquestionably Shelley Duvall's strongest, most moving and engaging performance of her entire career, it is also her single starring role... and the films ending segment, which ends in the strictly impressionistic, ambivalent surprise of Altman quietly 'pulling the rug out from underneath you', for my money perfectly compliments the rest of the film by slyly leaving everything you have just seen (and any of it's possible vague inflections about the human experience, and how and whatever any of the film intended to represent or comment on) completely and 100% up to your own personal interpretation... just as Donald Cammell's equally brilliant PERFORMANCE (1970) also succeeded in portraying and also shares practically the exact same deus-ex-machina of it's last final frames of film as does this largely unheralded, bona- fide Altman masterpiece, which has only managed to gain an incredible amount of momentum and word-of-mouth acceptance as the grand old dame of 1970's art house cinema of which it truly is.
Pranavist
Film-makers seldom go for the character driven movies as there is a high possibility of getting rejected by the audiences. Apparently Altman's risky attempt has been acclaimed because of the emotional spectrum being projected throughout this movie. If you are looking for an intellectual content in this movie, you will be disappointed. I presume that the director may be following a postmodern approach in order to prevent us from logical thinking. Like an anomaly this movie has a linear screenplay. So that the viewers would not be spending much time, thinking of it's chronological order. So basically the director's intention is to hypnotize the viewers with a relaxed mood and that's what makes it special from the other character driven movies.It's an irrefutable fact that Robert Altman was inspired by the movie Persona (Ingmar Bergman) to make this movie. Also the movies like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive belong to the same category. Three of them acted really well, out of which Sissy Spacek's performance is outstanding. And the cinematography is mediocre with the normal camera movements. Three of them have very different personae. Pinky was a timid and immature girl. Her personality was rather submissive. She finds it awkward to interact with her colleagues. Eventually Millie was instructed to take care of Pinky. And they become roommates. Pinky thinks Millie is perfect and gradually she observes Millie. Pinky even tries to read Millie's diary secretly. Along with their friendship they trade their personae gradually. Millie introduces owners of her apartment, Willie and Edgar. Their personality was mutually exclusive. Edgar was a complete extrovert but Willie was always silent. She never talks to someone. The rest of the events seems like a dream sequence and it's difficult to find an explanation for it.We can find that the three women Millie, Pinky and Willie shared something common.1) Three of them were betrayed by Edgar; Edgar was the husband of Willie and boyfriend of both Millie and Pinky.2) They were metaphorically represented as daemons in Willie's pictures near the swimming pool in their apartment.3) Although they were the slaves of Edgar, they betrayed in a triangular way as well; Willie --> Millie (bar); Millie --> Pinky (apartment); Pinky --> Willie (Willie's home)Eventually we can find that their minds complete each other according to the Freudian concept of psychoanalysis(Id, Ego and Super-ego). There is no intellectual conclusion in the world of emotions. It is meant to experience the emotional spectra produced by the director. It makes different impacts on each viewers and that cannot be expressed but only felt. Certainly I'm looking forward to watch the other movies of this genius.
