3 Women (The Criterion Collection)
by Robert Altman
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Actor: Janice Rule, Robert Fortier, Ruth Nelson, Shelley Duvall, Sissy SpacekDirector: Robert Altman
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Charles Rosher Jr.
Producer: Robert Altman
Writer: Robert Altman
Editor: Dennis M. Hill
Producer: Robert Eggenweiler
Producer: Scott Bushnell
Writer: Patricia Resnick
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 124 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-04-20
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Criterion
DVD Reviews of 3 Women (The Criterion Collection)
DVD Review: Altman's Obscurely Quiet Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
3 Women is one of the most compelling films I've seen in a long while. In some ways it features all of the familiar Altman traits (the quirky characters, the bizarre locations, the off-beat music, and the staggering this way and that storyline that, at times, threatens to dissolve into incoherence) but it also offers something that only a few of Altman's other classics have: moral depth.
I've tried to view all of Altman's seventies films but a few of them remain hard to track down. After many years I finally located California Split (recently released on DVD) and Thieves Like Us (still only available on VHS) but my favorite two Altman films are McCabe and Mrs. Miller (DVD) and The Long Goodbye (DVD). At least these two were my favorites before I viewed the most difficult to track down of all Altman films, 3 Women. Now its availbale on DVD but for years the only way you could see it was on late-night cable or in a New York art house revival of old Altman films. Nothing against 80's and 90's Altman but 70's Altman is where cinema begins and ends for anyone who grew up in that decade because Altman puts his finger right on something that no one even seems to see: that characters are always mysteriously disconnected from their surroundings, and that pop culture leaves its inhabitants curiously marooned in an artificial world and starved for connection to something real.
Altman has an uncanny knack for picking remote locations that simply re-inforce the feeling that each character is alone and buttressed by nothing but their own ingenuity. Whether its the beach house in Long Goodbye (which was Altmans own home at the time) or the rural suburbia of 3 Women these locations seem like utopian California dreamscapes that can with the bat of an eye turn into frightfully arid zones of psychic disintegration.
Altman was a painter for a time and though I am not aware of which painters he preferred I imagine he was influenced by the Bay Area figuritive artists like Diebenkorn whose Ocean Park series captures at once the lustre and menace of living in an enternally sunny oasis.
3 Women is frightening. Sissy Spacek is perhaps the most effective actress in recent cinema to make vacuity and emptiness seem so frightening. Shelly Duvall is equally good at conveying vacuity and emptiness but she fills her character "Millie's" void with an endless flow of words that at least provide her with the illusion that she is a coherent and functioning whole, thus rendering herself less vulnerable to the dissolution that Spacek's "Pinky" is powerless to ward off.
3 Women is best viewed with little foreknowledge of the story so I will not elaborate beyond that as to the psychic unraveling of these two. Suffice it to say that these two work in a kind of spa for the elderly. Its a location as bleak as the desert that surrounds it and equally void of emotion and character; the spa is run by the book and there is no room for anyone to show any individuality or to connect with others in any way but through professional roles and channels. Therefore Shelly Duvall's chattering is a constant earsore to her superiors, though to Sissy Spacek her chattering is like the one bit of proof that the spa does in fact have a pulse and that life does in fact exist.
The other two locations that figure prominently are the apartment complex (replete with seventies singles parties)and the desert bar where Millie and Pinky meet Willie, a highly eccentric artist-barkeep who expresses herself only visually. Her mosaics that decorate strangely unseen places like the unvisited and unseen oasis of a private pool bottom in the middle of nowhere are of haunting vengeful figures; the figures look Etruscan or Greek and they seem to forewarn of terrible things like the things in Greek tragedies.
The psyches in this film are each like unseen and unvisted oasis. We know next to nothing about the talkative Millie, the reticent wallflower Pinky, and the decidedly silent but intense and resentful Willie. All three do share one thing: they are women.
I urge Altman fans to view this, but also fans of Bergman's Persona, and DePalma's Sisters, and Polanski's Repulsion and fans of French directors like Claude Chabrol. This is an artsy (though in no way pretensious) film and not one you will ever fully cognitively master because it works at a level that defies rational, linear description.
Nashville is undoubtedly Altman's big budget masterpiece, but I think this one (now that people are able to finally view it) is becoming known as Altman's low-budget seventies masterpiece.
A film you will watch more than once, but I envy those of you who haven't seen it because the first viewing is the strangest. An absolutely singular experience.
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