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3 WOMEN 1977

Films that invite repeat viewings are my favorite. If the complexities of plot and character are authentic (and notsimply incomprehensibility posing as profundity), each viewing unearths new pleasures and a deeper understandingof the film’s themes.Robert Altman’s 3 Women is such a film, and it is, quite literally, a dream.

Shelley Duvall as Millie Lammoreaux

Sissy Spacek as Pinky Rose

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Janice Rule as Willie Hart

Altman claimed that much of the basic structure of this truly mesmerizing discourse on identity theft came to him in adream, and there is little reason to doubt the assertion given that 3 Women unfolds in the same shifting rhythms andfluid, non-linear logic of a dream half-remembered.Altman regular Shelley Duvall plays Millie Lammoreaux, the Palm Springs femme non-fatale of the Purple SageApartments: a garishly mauve modernist complex that looks to have sprouted out of the ground like a cactus flowerin the flat, arid landscape of the desert. Millie is an attendant at a spa for the elderly and fancies herself anirresistible man-trap.

Oblivious to the fact that to most everyone she is either invisible or insufferable, Millie floats on a lemon-coloredcloud of delusion fueled by romantic longing and women’s magazine clichés.The lone dissenting voice is that of Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), the childlike, slightly spooky new spa employee whosees in Millie, “The most perfect person I’ve ever met.”

If Millie’s personality is over determined, Pinky’s is as unformed as an infant’s (she has so little in the way of historyor possessions that she could be a visitor from another planet). But since she is the only person to ever reflect backto Millie her own image of herself, the two enter into a mutually advantageous roommate/friendship relationship thathas the “worldly” Millie giving the unrefined Pinky lessons in life. Lessons she learns all too well, as it turns out.

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Lemon Satin and Tickled PinkMillie's apartment is an overwhelming medley of sunshiny yellow and white, it gives the impression of living inside an egg

The 3rd woman of the title is Willie (Janice Rule), the enormously pregnant, mostly silent artist who spends all of hertime painting cryptic, luridly violent murals of anthropomorphic reptile people.

Willie is married to the hyper-macho Edgar (Robert Fortier), a swaggering, womanizing, former TV stunt double (“Heknows Hugh O’Brian!”) with whom she shares ownership of The Purple Sage Apartments and the town’s lone hot-spot, Dodge City: a run-down, western-themed bar/ghost town where off-duty cops come to drink beer, shoot gunsand ride dirt bikes.

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Robert Fortier as Edgar Hart

It’s with the introduction of the almost spectral character of Willie that 3 Women begins to take shape as somethinggrounded increasingly less in reality, yet something more chilling and unsettling than fantasy. As the ad copy on theposter read: “1 woman became 2, 2 women became 3, 3 women became 1.”

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILMThis one is a true original. There is something so fascinating in Altman’s use of magic realism in exploring the twinphenomenon of personality and identity as things both contagious and fluid. He creates unique characters and aworld that is real but jarringly off-kilter (not in that self-conscious, Cohen Brothers way, mercifully), and in the finelyobserved details, 3 Women is often heartbreakingly funny while being downright eerie.

Craig Richard Nelson (A Wedding) and Sierra Pecheur portray Dr. Maas and Ms. Bunweill, the unrelentingly practical-minded operators of thehealth spa. Displaying inverse traditional male and female characteristics, the pair appear to have undergone a personalty transference of their

own.

What gets me about 3 Women is that no matter how unusual the characters, how off-rhythm their interactions,everything feels as if it comes from an emotional and human truth. The characters may be amplifications...their traitsand behavior given a surreal, dreamy oddness...but in a weird way, it's that very quality that makes them comeacross more genuinely. It's as if you are watching people who have had their most hidden, inner selves, moved tothe surface.For example, no one has probably ever met a person as rabidly devoted to the "Cosmo Philosophy" of femininity orthose loopy "Kraft Kitchen" home economist credos as Millie in real-life (at least I hope not); but her embodimentand complete faith in the "how to catch a man" propaganda women have been fed for generations, makes hercharacter less an object of ridicule than someone we recognize and perhaps empathize with.

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The "fixin's" for one of Millie's characteristically indigestible socio-gastronomical nightmares

PERFORMANCESShelley Duvall gives one of the best performances of the 70s, and certainly what I consider the best of her career.She can take a character comprised almost exclusively of derisible (if not absurd) characteristics and finds thehumanity within. Though audiences are encouraged to laugh at Millie’s ever-thwarted attempts at maintaining an airof sophisticated insouciance at all times (try as she might she can’t seem to prevent her flowing skirts from gettingcaught in her car door) one can’t help but feel empathy for her poignant quest to mean something to herself.

Sissy Spacek, an actress able to project earthiness or other-worldliness at will, is remarkable in a role that requiresher to be an enigma, but not a blank slate. Her ability to convey a childlike innocence without coming across asmentally challenged is attributable to Spacek's questioning, She seems to be taking information in like a computer. Ilove her transformation(s). She has inhabited three distinct women by the film's conclusion.

There's something a little terrifying in the kind of woman Pinky "becomes" after her accident

Janice Rule really surprised me in 3 Women, because prior to this film I had only ever seen her in the truly atrociousDean Martin Matt Helm film, The Ambushers -1967 (it's a Matt Helm film, did I really need to add the "atrocious"part?). If you ever want to see the definition of "reluctant sexpot," check out that film. Rule, decked out in a comicassortment of skimpy, mod outfits, is the most glum, sad-looking sexist eye-candy you've ever seen. In each sceneshe looks as though she wishes she were anywhere else.

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Given that as a first impression, I was pleased to see her in what appears a more comfortable environment as themost puzzling member of Altman's trio. The same solemn sadness so distracting in The Ambushers is present here,but to infinitely more satisfying effect.

THE STUFF OF FANTASYThe recurring motifs of water, mirrors and other reflective surfaces gives 3 Women a hallucinatory quality well-served by its haunting score and the flat, dried-out Palm Springs locations. The expansive emptiness of the landtakes on the look of Dali-esque dream landscapes.

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3 Women

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Pinky- "I wonder what it's like to be twins...do you think they know which one they are?"

"Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits. Perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly andmagnificently." Ingmar Bergman Fanny and Alexander 1979

For years Woody Allen has been knocking himself out superficially channeling Ingmar Bergman, and here RobertAltman hits a bullseye his first time out with this incontestably American nod to Bergman’s Persona.

I suppose what I've always related to in 3 Women is how it so poetically speaks to the need to connect and thebasic, human desire to be acknowledged. Looking at the film through the eyes of the college kid I was when the filmwas released, I'm aware of what I shared with Millie: pretentiousness, the need for self-invention (or re-invention).Also, what I shared with Pinky: a fear of growing up and a wish to remain childlike; a longing to care for and be

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cared for by someone.Watching the film now as an adult, I find myself stunned by the keenness of its observations and touched by howgently Altman treats these damaged characters. Ultimately, I find 3 Women to be one of Altman’s most humaneworks and, it remains after all these years, hands-down my favorite of all of his many excellent films.

Pinky- "I had a bad dream."Millie- "Dreams can't hurt you."

Copyright © Ken Anderson

About Ken Anderson

LA-based writer and lifelong film enthusiast. You can read more of his essays on films of the ’60s & ‘70s at DreamsAre What Le Cinema Is For

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