Review of 3 Women (1977) by Emanuel D — 22 Jul 2007

We all dream. Not even the plainest, least artistically inclined philistine will have dreams that have a beginning, a body and an end. You may like your movies to be predictable, the hero to win and walk into the sunset and all lose ends tied up. You can choose your movies but you cannot choose your dreams.

For some that may be a good reason to avoid movies that ?do not make sense?. Avoid David Lynch, Robert Altman and all those who followed Robert Weine (see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)) in the notion that cinema, being a process of connecting unrelated images, is the perfect medium to replicate dreams.

If dreams are the key to our psyche, than movies are the key to our dreams.

Roger Ebert says that Robert Altman told him he dreamt 3 Women, cast, script and all, and simply went about playing out his dream. Loose ends abound. There is an oppressive sense of enigma, of implication, of a private relationship between dream and dreamer that we witness as outsiders.

There is also an odd imbalance between attention to detail and broad focus. The story has its broad strokes but little direction and it seems to pause and look into trivial minutiae while it wonders where to go next. I do not mean this normatively: it is the structural choice of the film which imitate dreams in scope and pattern ? if that?s the right word.

The three titular women could not be more different from each other.

Shelley Duvall is Millie Lammoreaux. In spite of the name, she?s from Texas. She works in an old people?s therapy centre as a health assistant. She is what may be described as ?sad?, not simply in the not-happy sense of the word but in the pathetically-socially-inadequate sort. She goes around ingratiating herself with colleagues, neighbours and bar crowds who ignore her and talk through her and laugh behind her back. She has a fetish for yellow objects and she infects spaces she feels she can possess ? notably her apartment and her clothes ? with the colour of her choice.

Sissy Spacek is Pinky Rose. Like Millie?s, her real name is Mildred, but she comes into the film hating her name. She also is socially inadequate but in an overgrown child sort of way. Her colour is pink and as the film progresses and she encroaches on Millie?s space, one colour eats up the other as if this was a battle of cancers.

The relationship between the two is odd. It starts with adulation. Innocent, first-time-out-of-the-(also-Texan)-farm Pinky is lonely and worships Millie for her (apparent to Pinky at least) sophistication, taste and social contacts. She thinks Millie is the most perfect person ever and her little yellow apartment the most perfect place ever.

Millie dismissively enjoys the attention and treats Pinky like the lap dog she seems to be. The more Millie kicks Pinky, the more Pinky comes back for more.

In the background, woman number three is Willie Hart played by Janice Rule. She does not say much. She?s pregnant but her partner (operator of the apartment block where the two girls live) is a gun-slinging weirdo who seems little interested in her. She seems little interested in much herself, except for her eerie paintings of gods and monsters mostly on the bottom of swimming pools.

There are quite a lot of archetypal dream icons dotted around the film: people who seem to switch roles and characters, pools of water, uncertainty about age, inconsistency of character.

And the Hart woman is a mainstay of dreams: a person who seems to be watching all the time. A person who seems to be both inside the dream and dreaming it. A repository of the dreamer?s curiosity and momentary self-consciousness.

There is no plot arc as such in the film, there is more like a jolt towards the middle where things seem to be shaken up to see how differently they would settle down. In a scene where Pinky is humiliated again by Millie, who is cavorting with Willie?s husband (Robert Fortier), Pinky jumps into the pool from a height and falls into a coma. When she wakes up she is a different person. Her hunger to fill the void of personality which is within her hollow self now turns aggressive and she essentially takes over Millie?s life.

She no longer wants to be called ?Pinky?. She is Mildred now. She stretches her space in Millie?s apartment encroaching on Millie?s space until she all but evicts her. She wears her clothes, reads her diary ? even writes in her diary. She takes over the flirtation with the Hart man who in any case is too drunk to be bothered to distinguish what comes to him. She uses Millie?s social security number and befriends the neighbours that used to avoid Millie because of how insufferably pathetic she was and is.

Altman says Ingmar Bergen?s Persona inspired him to tell this story of a character effectively taking over the identity of another. There is enough doubt in this film to wonder if there actually are two (or three characters) at all ? or if Millie is really an invisible alter ego created by Pinky?s imagination and then, when she feels ready, she herself stepped into the role she imagined.

But what of Willie? She does not speak much but is in the pool when the unconscious Pinky is pulled out. And she only starts speaking again when she gives birth to a dead baby watched by Millie who is too stupid to do anything and Pinky who is too spiteful to do anything.

By the end of the film the enigma compounds itself when the three women seem to form a family from which the drunken cowboy Hart is entirely absent. Perhaps: and I am speculating here, both Mildreds are objects of Willie?s imagination like her gods in the bottom of the pool. They are components of her own identity incarnated in her dreams. And they are turbulent dreams as she is obviously pregnant by the work of the wrong man, if ever there was one.

Confused? Don?t let that scare you. But don?t expect things to be much clearer at the end of this haunting, exquisite cinematic experience.