3 Women
d. Robert Altman, 1977
Robert Altman is one of the great American directors. What he did between 1970 and 1977 is nearlly unparalled. With McCabe & Mrs. Miller in '71, Nashville in '75, and 3 Women in '77, it would be hard to argue that he's not the best director of the 70s, period. Not only that, but the fact that he came back in '92 and '93 with The Player and Short Cuts, respectively, is also quite astonishing. Even with all those great films, 3 Women stands out as perhaps the most original and poetically beautiful.
3 Women plays out as a dream, it asks the viewer not to understand it or try to pin it down with standard rationale. Instead, it demands to be experienced. When a movie is this captivating, whether it makes sense or not is unimportant. It does help, however, that the film is not just a random series of episodes; there is a cohesive structure present, if only emotionally.
The first character introduced is Millie Lammoreux (a wonderful Shelley Duvall), a woman who works at a solarium. The film sees her as a person trying very hard to be noticed, only be to rejected and ignored by most of the people she knows. Then along comes Pink Rose (Sissy Spacek), a shy girl that often behaves like a child (one of the first times the audience sees her is as she blows bubbles in her soda). From the start, Pinky takes a liking to Millie, who is oblivious to the way she is perceived by others. Eventually, Pinky moves in with Millie and at some point the relationship turns sour.
As the title states, there is a third woman in the movie. Willie Hart (Janice Rule) is the wife of Edgar (Robert Fortier), who owns the local bar as well as the apartment complex where Millie and Pinky live. Willie is often seen painting murals around both the bar and the pool at the complex. She doesn't speak much throughout the film, and Pinky and Millie know very little about her.
At this point I'll momentarily draw away from the plot and go into some kind of strange rambling about where I place the film among others. Sometimes, films can be seen among others that match it, whether it be thematically, visually, or otherwise. For example, I tend to look at Fellini's La Dolce Vita with Antonioni's films of the time like L'Avventura and L'Eclisse because of the way they address ennui and the perils of modern life. Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God could not only be seen as similar to his other features, but other epic masterpieces like Coppola's Apocalypse Now. In that same way, 3 Women shares a lot with Bergman's Persona (a film Altman was inspired by) and Lynch's Mulholland Drive (a film very likely inspired by Altman's). All of these three fims deal with overlapping and eventually shifting pesonalities between women. In Persona, it is the relationship between an actress that has decided to stop speaking and her nurse. Mulholland Drive deals with what happens when irresponsible dreams are set-up and followed, as well as with the lives of two women who inhabit two different universes during the movie. And 3 Women, with its three main characters, is about the same type of relationship in which the story only comes full circle with a mild, but powerful, revelation.
Not only do these three films share some sort of thematic foundation, they also have a scene in their respective story that works pretty much the same in all three of them. These scenes (which I like to call the "fracture") serves within the context of the film as the part that breaks the mood and sets up the rest of the film. In Persona, it comes when the film actually breaks and the movie starts over. In Mulholland Drive it comes shortly after both of the main characters visit "Club Silencio," where they learn that everything is an illusion. Altman also handles the "fracture" sequence beautifully. After having an arguement with Millie, Pinky goes outside and jumps into the pool from the second floor. She is injured and is taken to the hospital. She is in a coma for an unspecified amount of time and when she comes back home, the admiration she had for Millie is gone and everything has pretty much changed.
The undercurrent dealing with Willie is not really exploited until the last couple of scenes, and these scenes are what wrap up the story. 3 Women ends on an unsure note, but could anyone watching this film (or Persona or Mulholland Drive for that matter) really expect everything to be explained?
