3 Women (1977)

Waste of time

An Exercise In Nonsense

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Surreal, Ambiguous and at times disturbing. This offering from Robert Altman is claimed to have been based on the director's dreams. It captures the lives of three women whose personalities take a bizarre turn after an accident.This movie needs multiple viewings to arrive at one's own interpretation. Recommended for Viewers who like movies that leaves an audience with more questions than answers.

If Roger Ebert who rated this the best film of 1977 and the writer, producer and director, Robert Altman are shaken on what exactly this film is about, I guess I am allowed to be rather hazy on some aspects myself. I was certainly rather lost, bewildered and not at all happy during the opening fifteen minutes or so of care home/spar footage with old folks being walked about but then the almost automaton like behaviour of Shelley Duvall and the charm of Sissy Spacek won me over. Both performances grow in stature as the film progresses and indeed it would seem that if a large chunk of this enterprise began in Altman's dreams whilst his wife was in hospital, much also grew from Duvall's improvisation. It is a wonderful and increasingly endearing turn and when the talk turns to the behaviour of twins and personalities begin to shimmer, shake and more, this one of a kind dreamlike experience becomes indeed a wonder to behold.

What would happen if you could surgically trisect the personality of a lonely woman into three distinct personalities (somewhat like Multiple Personality Disorder, but with no common root, and no need for escape or protection from a hellish reality) and put them in three separate bodies? What might they be like? Finally set free from the constraints of the others and allowed to surface and breathe free as individuals, what would these new women reveal about their desires and frustrations and strengths and gaping frailties? One could be a child with amnesia, experiencing the world for the first time, as though she had just been let out of her house for the first time, or as though she were an alien from another world, a la Starman (1984).One could be a young post-adolescent woman who learns her social and fashion and cooking skills by reading how-to magazine articles.One could be an angry artist, disgusted with her husband, a useless, one-speed hedonist.What if they could somehow find each other and become one whole person, greater than the sum of her parts? What if they existed only as characters in the dream of a woman who had moved to a new town in order to put her past behind her and start a new life?

Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek) is an introverted young woman starting work at a health spa in California. She is so shy that on her first day at work, she doesn't even challenge her co-worker Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) who mistakes her for a client. Millie needs a roommate and Pinky quickly snaps it up. However Pinky's quiet loner nature turns Millie against her. After Millie berates Pinky, Pinky takes a suicidal dive into the pool leaving her in a coma. When she wakes up, there's a change in Pinky and Millie finds strange occurrences perpetrated by Pinky.The first half is fine with Spacek and Duvall playing to their comfort zones. I kept wondering where this movie is going with this. Then it takes a hard turn into Single White Female situation. That is a great turn but it doesn't continue as I expected. It goes into a surreal sojourn in some kind of poetic journey. It's definitely a surprise but I'm not convinced that it's a good surprise. I think a more simpler road with the two girls would be more compelling especially considering the third woman is only a minor character. Maybe there's a point in the surreal poetry that I missed.