3 Women

Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977) is a dreamscape that explores the enigmatic hesitancy of assigning meaning to a film that exists outside reason and logic. While the film is certainly rationally and philosophically coherent, its mysteries endanger viewers who are unwilling to forego explanations about why everything happens in the manner in which it does. This is instead a film dictated by its own circular logic, focusing on the reinterpretation of meaning as it complicates itself and collapses inward, yet always foregoing answers.

This is the story of Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), a young woman who ventures from the southern Midwest into the California desert to work at a senior care center. Pinky Rose is quiet and an introvert, which leads her to identify with the outgoing and loquacious Millie Lammoreaux (Shelly Duvall). She eventually moves in with Millie at her apartment, becoming dominated by Millie’s verbal belligerence and chronic weariness that soon becomes constantly directed at her. Meanwhile, Pinky Rose watches as Willie Hart (Janice Rule), a silent pregnant middle-aged female painter moves around the outskirts of the plot, always resisting categorization.

The way in which Pinky Rose and Millie interact, acting as opposite ends of a spectrum, eventually collapses halfway through the narrative as Pinky jumps off the second story landing into the outdoor pool below, going into a coma. When she comes out of the coma, her persona evaporates and is instead constituted by Millie’s former governance and authority. In turn, Millie loses her rationality and externalizes Pinky Rose’s former stifled and suppressed interiority. The adoption of identity is one of Altman’s key themes here and the expression of these ideas, dreamily represented by the submersion into water (re: amniotic fluid), leads the film into a murky area where consciousness is not cogently known, but rather understood piecemeal, revealing itself in gradual waves of knowledge.

The film, then, concludes by reprioritizing everything that has transpired into one last dreamily state of cognizance, as we start to understand how the events are “meant” to be read and character formations are “meant” to be understood. Those pesky quote unquote signs remain, though, because Altman and the film refuse to categorize rational thought to everything that has just been viewed. Its lucidity, that is, defies complete representation and leads merely to possibilities that are counterpoints to earlier mysteries and tones. And if that avoids answering why the film is so engaging, one starts to understand that the film gains its meaning precisely because of its avoidance of issues of ontology.

3 Women is a film that rewards any reading as possible, but also rewards the hesitancy that one brings to the film as events refuse to line up with rational meaning. The break halfway through the narrative, then, exists in the same way that Persona and Mulholland Dr. break from conventional narrative, exploring in metaphor the complex vicissitudes of memory, dream, and reality. If not Altman’s best film, this is certainly his most personal film.

3 Women: 10/10