1977 Directed by Robert Altman
An awkward young teen working at a spa becomes overly attached to her fellow worker, a lonely outcast. They hang out at a bar owned by a strange pregnant artist and her has-been cowboy husband. Amid emotional crises, the three woman steal and trade one another's personalities.
Three Women, Trois femmes, 3 kvinnor
just when you think you’re starting to understand these women, they morph into something else entirely. they’re dream-like, ethereal, intangible, as if viewed through an opaque silk screen, a forcefield preventing us from fully connecting. meanwhile, the atmosphere is a brilliant, melancholic fog of pastel blues and pinks — a comfortably warm sauna that one enters to bask in, to succumb to, not to overanalyze and stew in. leave it to altman to successfully pull off a cotton candy-colored feature-length homage to persona!
sissy spacek being obsessed with shelley duvall during the first half of this movie is such a mood
california is dry.
we made a pilgrimage to where my father grew up a few summers ago. it was endless hours in the car, starring out the window or fiddling with our phones. it's funny how vast the scenery can seem, when greenery is a luxury and the world has been drained of water. the sky looks bigger. the landscape seems less forgiving.
there's something hazy about the heat. you wonder if everything is real. i needed to get out of the car constantly to remind myself that the world could be touched. you pass by others and they become a part of you and then they are forgotten.
it's all give and take in the car: small moments are…
The failure of an attempted escape from a self-replicating cycle of inherited behavior, a whirlpool of prescribed femininity, its transmission from generation to generation a form of psychological transference. Janice Rule fires bullet after bullet at a picture of a snake eating its own tail.
Robert Altman’s “3 Women” is a film obsessed with the idea of the gaze. Its stare is so powerful that it turns inward, travels through the navel, and pours out through the distortion of the mind.
It’s a fitting journey for a movie born from a dream. Altman’s wife came up with the idea for the plot as she lay in a hospital, near death.
Not one to attempt to follow logic - dream or otherwise - the liminal realm lends itself perfectly to Altman’s meandering storytelling style. The director allows stars Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek to improvise their way through large swaths of scenes, giving the film a sensation of drifting through the haze of headspace.
It’s not…
I made up my personality in a dream. I stole parts of it from every girl I’ve ever met. I liked her hair so it became mine. I liked her jokes and the words she used and her clothes. I mean really are any of us real anyway? Who are we at our core? We’re all just the product of the people around us, taking the parts that we like. Parts of you get taken away all the time too.
There’s a constant push and pull with women on what type of woman she should be based on who is surrounding you. Like we’re always being forced into a dichotomy. It’s interesting that this film explores balance in relationships. I…
Through others we become ourselves.
it might seem strange, but - and in this sense it strikes its similarities with Persona - 3 Women seems, at its heart, a study in rebirth through imitation.
life is but an idle battleground, with a darkness awaiting us from the shadows, patiently sitting, counting the moments before it can pounce at us, unmasking us and showing the world who we truly are within, who we have always been. every act we take is watched with an analytical depth beyond any comprehension, and our thoughts and feelings are all read with a great understanding than what we ourselves may ever understand.
we may build up an archetype of what we believe ourselves to be,…
“i rather face a 1,000 crazy savages than one woman who’s learned how to shoot.”
a hidden gem in the “female fever dream” category, robert altman’s 3 women, is a vivid medium where the numerous stages of womanhood interlink. possessing the beauty and mystique of an impressionist paining, the ominous atmosphere veers from its hazy and pastel aesthetics. the introductory score lurking with suspense, prepares us for an element of eeriness while duvall and spacek’s warm dynamics, soften the screen. the story is a fragmented hallucination, touching three feminine and symbolic personalities that eventually morph into a jagged bond of solidarity—a quality absent in one is radiant in another. it is a delicate personal transformation, propelled by time and trauma.
having…
what i loved most about this apart from the very 70s aesthetic is how inconsequential all of the men were
"You're the most perfect person I ever met."
Robert Altman's dream-inspired 3 Women prompts the pressing query of enervation: which is more stultifying—climatic desiccation or cultural vapidity? At a gloomy, sun-bleached Palm Springs rehabilitation center for the elderly, inscrutable trainee Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek) forms a parasitic bond with platitudinous outcast Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall). A gauche tabula rosa, Pinky makes an ideal dupe for Millie's ersatz sophistication—comprised of highly processed recipes and vulgar interior design tips from supermarket magazines—and misreads her obliviousness to rejection as poise. After swiftly progressing from lapdog to roommate, the apparently vacant Pinky continues to absorb Millie's synthetic personality wholesale. Completely unused to flattery, Millie enjoys being the subject of Pinky's sycophancy until it compromises…
85/100
Not much to add to my Time Out New York review, written for its Film Forum run in 2002, back when there was still no DVD. I've seen this three times now and on both repeat viewings it's turned out to be much weirder and more impervious to analysis than I remembered. That's mostly a good thing.
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An insert provided with the DVD of Mulholland Drive offers "David Lynch's ten clues to unlocking this thriller," directing confused viewers to "notice appearances of the red lampshade" and "pay particular attention to the beginning of the film." Robert Altman's 3 Women—a tour de force of dream logic set in Southern California, involving two young women whose identities shift like tectonic…
