3 Women 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.
Três Mulheres, Trois femmes, 세 여인, Three Women
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!
Born from a dream and sharing the same inconsistent logic, Robert Altman’s 3 Women is a strange and elusive drama exploring the transitory nature of identities. Although best known for his narratively complex ensemble dramas it is Altman’s experimental chamber pieces that provide some of his most interesting work.
As the title implies, 3 Women, is centred on the complicated and shifting relationships between three women in the Californian desert. Sissy Spacek stars as the naive Pinky, a young woman from Texas who becomes obsessed with her colleague and roommate, Millie (Shelley Duvall). Millie is a woman with a deluded sense of confidence who is blindly ignored by all those around her. The third woman in this triumvirate is Janice…
I admire Altman's craft, certainly, when he delivers images like Millie crossing a massive mural of mutated, naked human beings with their genitals askew and erect, their faces distorted in what looks to me like horror. Or when he shows just a bit of Millie's dress sticking out from her car door (the first image I needed to capture in this film) or Pinky's curled, broken form in the pool (or just before, standing up to the rail). Some of these evoke wonder, some horror, some just surreal desire (what can I say). But.
Well, before but. Everyone seems to talk about how the three women merge into one balanced being or whatever, but no one really seems to reflect…
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.
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.
***************************************************************************************
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…
A masterpiece on every level, and only gets better on each viewing.
More people should be aware of this film.
An all time favourite of mine.
One of the greatest treasures of fiction is that it can give a reader insight into a character's internal life. One of the greatest treasures of cinema is that it can be playful and do things visually and aurally that transcend the normal boundaries of narrative. Such is usually the case in films that deal with identity and how fluid it can be. Altman's 3 Women is definitely one of those movies. It starts off as a quirky, slightly pretentious study of two roommates in a dusty California town, but slowly reveals itself to be a meditation on identity, gender roles, and personhood. I would have given this 4 1/2 stars except for the music. I know Altman likes to repeat music as a way of being "funny" (think of how he did the same with The Long Goodbye), but it is grating to me. That said, 5 stars for Spacek and Duvall.
A silly film to try writing about because if ever there was an ethereal, unsettlingly atmospheric film to just let wash over you, it’s this. Everything here exists on a mental plane constantly morphing and mutating. California resembles Texas, or maybe it’s the other way around. Millie says she hates tomatoes in one scene, then promises to cook a tomato-based meal the next. Things quietly and imperceptibly shift out of normalcy. Altman is usually known for films like Nashville and Short Cuts, which traverse a wide scope of characters across sprawling areas, and while this film is ostensibly doing the opposite, maybe he has just crammed his usual plethora of people into 2 or 3 here, having them shift between…
18/20
Cuando Ron Howard ganó el oscar a mejor director por "una mente brillante", la cámara se poso en el intercambio de miradas entre Robert Altman y Lynch. Intercambio sobrador, como diciendo "mira quien nos gano". Pero hay algo más. Estoy seguro que Altman pensaba que tenía el doble de chances de ganar, no porque haya dirigido Gosford Park mejor que Lynch Mullholland Drive, sino por la similitud en la cinta de Lynch con 3 Women.
Pero claro, desde el cielo (o más seguro, desde el infierno) Bergman se reía.
Esta es la película de Altman que más me gustó hasta ahora. Se ve, como en todas las que vi, la ignorancia por parte de una figura de poder, en este caso el jefe de Millie y Pinky, en GP era el detective, en MASH el teniente general. Pero tiene este aura de originalidad que no tuvo el resto.
Thumbs Up.
MAYOI 518 films
while magical realism focuses on the hybridity of fantastical elements and realistic setting, presenting highly contrasted context within the realm…
