Robert Altman’s 3 Women was inspired by a dream and he made sure that it shows. Even in its most grounded or mundane scenes, through camera and sound and music he suggests something enigmatic beneath the surface -a tension waiting to release that feels wholly at odds with the apparent simplicity of scenes merely depicting an evolving friendship between two young women (the third comes into play eventually). There’s a certain tendency to the characters’ dynamic and their individual voices that bears hint of an unreliable nature -it doesn’t have the tangibility of most of his better known films, it’s almost strictly psychological.
It’s also very much his ode to Bergman’s Persona, which I figure he must have seen not long before the dream that conjured his movie, and he very much adapts its themes of duality and identity, while shaping them in a distinct archetypal sense -it is after all rather broadly called 3 Women.
Most of the movie just focuses on two though: Millie Lammoreaux, played by Shelley Duvall, a senior employee at a health spa in some small California town in the desert, and Pinky Rose, played by Sissy Spacek, a young, impressionable new co-worker who positions herself under Millie’s wing. Both women come to this town from Texas and both curiously have the same name -”Pinky” being a pseudonym for Mildred. And yet they have very different affects and personalities that just happen to complement each other in opposition. Millie is a vain and highly opinionated chatterbox without much self-awareness in spite of her extroverted attitude. While Pinky is rather timid but enthusiastic, with a slight streak of mischief, and who seems to be the only person genuinely interested in and inspired by Millie. Meanwhile, Willie -played by Janice Rule- is their pregnant landlady, a painter of elaborate, somewhat explicit murals around town and on the property, and who seems ambivalent to both of the younger women.
In case it wasn't apparent -and it doesn't really become clear until Willie enters the story- but each of the three women is a representation of a specific classical feminine character: the girl, the liberated woman, and the mother. And they act out the tropes associated with those types and their relationship to one another. The girl admires yet is also subservient to the liberated woman, both of whom are looked on with mature distance from the mother. The woman in her worldly interests and sexual availability is perhaps a bad influence on the girl and one whose lifestyle is doomed to end -it's a pretty antiquated morality that Altman calls upon here but an interesting one nonetheless. And the actresses each embody these roles in complete ways, while (at least in the case of Duvall and Spacek) defining them as characters in their own right. It is possible, at least for a while, to view the movie in strict literal terms.
Spacek was the same age as Duvall, but playing Carrie just a year before adequately prepared her for relaying the adolescent sensibility of Pinky -and indeed Pinky, who ultimately engages in much of the very behaviour that would horrify Mother White is something of a mirror image of Carrie. She feels like a girl suppressed, only gradually learning to express herself more vividly with someone like Millie for a role model. And even as it may be misplaced, it is adorable to see Pinky’s delight at having a friend and a welcome presence in her home. Duvall meanwhile vigorously takes to her obtusely self-absorbed character. In a way, Millie could be seen as an extension of her party girl from Nashville, but there’s a little more subtlety to how her conceited nature develops here. She’s initially very friendly and bubbly, loving the respect and attention Pinky gives her which -though she won’t admit to herself - she doesn’t receive very often. But it doesn’t take long for her mean side to emerge -when she comes home from a date that never transpired to an accident that Pinky is rectifying. Her friendliness seems to fade, and there’s also the hint of the sweetness of Pinky doing the same. The way she asks how the date went certainly feels loaded.
Inevitably, the woman feels obliged to prove to the girl her sexual maturity -bringing home Willie’s husband Edgar (Robert Fortier) a shameless philanderer who in spite of his pregnant wife is all too eager to not only commit infidelity but to attempt to persuade the roommates into a threesome. But for Millie, all he needs to be is a symbol, and with it proven to Pinky’s objections -her only real resistance of any kind to an aspect of Millie’s lifestyle- the girl must be expelled, though Millie is ill-prepared for the consequences.
There is a sharp shift at the point where Pinky attempts suicide -a mixture of being driven by Millie's dejection and drawn to Willie's feminine murals at the bottom of the pool. In any case, the girl dies and is reborn a woman. She gains in confidence, reacts to her parents with disdainful ignorance (claiming not to know them), lies to Millie, openly disrespects her, and takes her place in an affair with Edgar. In concert with this, the previously careless woman becomes more maternal in disposition as she reckons with immense guilt over the incident. Beyond the totems, Millie's new-found character brings a fresh level of sympathy for her, as she reorients herself to Pinky's care -while Pinky is coloured in her harsh behaviour with outright vindictiveness. It's not simply that the roles are reversed -Pinky becomes the cooler though also meaner version of Millie, while Millie retreats into a more timid, more fretful Pinky. The range of both Spacek and Duvall is demonstrated with aplomb (Spacek's casting especially feels so pointed), as each handily carves out their take on these fascinating character types.
But if the girl becomes the woman and the woman becomes the mother, what happens to the mother? Where is Willie in this trifecta? Willie is absent for a lot of the movie, and silent as she works on her art -but it is in her domain that Millie and Pinky live their lives. Off-camera, she is the victim of infidelity as perpetrated by both her tenants -in this we feel sorry for her, the only one of the women to be in attitude genuinely non-objectionable the entire movie. And she is at the heart of the film’s critical scene, where she goes into labour (Edgar callously left her during this for his affair). She is forced to deliver at home with Millie as unprepared midwife because a petrified Pinky doesn’t call for a doctor. And the infant is a stillborn. In a movie that typically doesn’t tread this way, it is a very intense sequence, viewed almost entirely through the ambivalent lens of Pinky watching just outside -the audience a voyeur in her shoes. This could be Pinky observing the completion of Millie’s transformation into mature responsible womanhood simultaneous to the culmination (and apparent end) of Pinky’s space in that role. Indeed the miscarriage seems to kill the ‘liberated woman’ in both of them, while Willie ascends her role to a grandmotherly figure to both -as evident in the final scene that follows, where Pinky seems reverted once again to child, Millie has become full-fledged mother, and Willie is around to look over them both, all three now living in the isolated home, implied to have killed Edgar together.
So that is all well and good, but what does Altman mean by it? He calls the film 3 Women, denoting each as various but interlacing symbols of womanhood -is it a broad statement on what defines the gender or a breakdown of such statements that confine it to one thing? Of course a man can’t speak to either of these, I think he’s just intrigued by this idea of feminine aspects in relation to each other. It is a fascinating study in how this man interprets them -particularly his judgement of the adult woman, neither girl nor mother. He is attracted to the psychology and submits this film as a kind of conceptual exercise. In applying the duality of Persona, having Millie and Pinky mirror each other, he’s able to realize their contrast more blatantly as well. In relation to this, it’s worth noting the dreamlike atmosphere of the movie, and as in Persona the mixing of identities. All three women have the same name or near enough -are they just interchangeable components of one person? If so, which is real? There’s something to be said of that dream sequence of Pinky’s during a brief moment in the last act where she and Millie appear to reconcile -a Bergman phantasm that evokes being trapped under water. It’s a motif we see elsewhere in the movie related to Pinky, to perhaps suggest she is a repressed part of this greater dreamer, who could be either Millie or Willie. In the end, all three women are distinct yet together.
Whatever rationale was behind his deeply symbolic movie, Altman still made it wonderfully intriguing, moulded through the sharp and more revelatory efforts of Duvall and Spacek, each giving one of the best performances of their careers. It is a movie in conversation with one of Altman’s earlier underrated pieces Images -they would make for a great double-feature; and it shows that the big canvas, large ensemble director was just as adept with intimate movies as well. Even if he doesn’t articulate his ideas as profoundly as he might (the conceit coming from a dream, it may even be shallower than he imagined), 3 Women is still dramatically effective and a treat to parse.
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