Review #929 - 3 Women (1977)
THE SCOOP
Director: Robert Altman
Cast: Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janice Rule, Robert Fortier
Plot: Pinky is an awkward adolescent who starts work at a spa in the California desert. She becomes overly attached to fellow spa attendant, Millie when she becomes Millie's room-mate. Mille is a lonely outcast who desperately tries to win attention with constant up-beat chatter. They hang out at a bar owned by a strange pregnant artist and her has-been cowboy husband.
Genre: Drama
Awards: Won Best Actress and nom. for Palme d'Or (Cannes). Nom. for 1 BAFTA - Best Actress.
Runtime: 124min
Rating: PG for some thematic issues.
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)
“I had the most wonderful dream...”
Seven years into film reviewing,
and this is only the second Robert Altman film I have seen after MASH (1970). Watching 3
Women makes me both curious and regretful.
It has ignited my curiosity about Altman’s other works, notably well-regarded
pictures like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971),
Nashville (1975), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993) and Gosford
Park (2001), many I have heard about but never made the effort to catch. At the same time, I regret not giving Altman
more attention than I would have liked to.
3 Women is
not exactly a staggering achievement, but it is Altman’s at his most
surreal. It gets under your skin by dictating
not how you think, but how you feel. And
how you feel is all that matters in this enigmatic work, even if you can’t
possibly describe what that feeling is, though I believe it is the feeling of
watching great cinema unfold and it feels that way with 3 Women.
It features two mesmerizing
performances from Sissy Spacek (Carrie, 1976;
Coal Miner’s Daughter, 1980) and
Shelly Duvall (The Shining, 1980) who
play Pinky and Millie respectively.
Pinky becomes attracted to Millie when they spend time together during
and after work. They become roommates. Then things start to become strange, even
bordering on the disturbing.
3 Women works
like a hallucinatory dreamscape, something that is a toss between Stanley
Kubrick and David Lynch. Altman’s use of
sound and music (composed by Gerald Busby – his one and only score for a
feature narrative) is masterful. The
music comes across as experimental and unsettling, while sound is given
particular emphasis in a powerful, dreamy montage sequence towards the end.
By using physical ‘veils’ such as
water and mirrors, Altman and his cinematographer Charles Rosher Jr. give us an
impressionistic and chilling quality to the film’s visual style, accompanied by
slow zooms and pans, and its subliminal focus on a bizarre woman named Willie
(Janice Rule) and her morbid fresco paintings on grounds and walls.
David Sterritt, chairman of the
National Society of Film Critics, describes 3
Women as “such a seamless weave of image, sound, story, and character that
no plot summary can do it justice”. Made
in 1977 when George Lucas and Steven Spielberg released Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind respectively, 3 Women is the antithesis of the blockbuster treatment, yet it
received studio backing from 20th Century Fox despite a rapidly changing
economic landscape.
3 Women
was literally, metaphorically and cinematically a dream project for Altman, and
I am quite sure it is one of his very best.
Verdict:
Dreamlike, mesmerizing and enigmatic, this is as close as you get to a
surreal dose of Robert Altman.
GRADE: A-
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