Well of course i’ve noticed that. Altman wrote the screenplay himself and said it was based on a dream he had.
Some Dream!
After working on this film Janice Rule gave up acting and devoted the rest of her life to becoming a psychoanalyst.
No wonder.
Shelley Duvall and Sissey Spacek are Beyond Great in it. Dennis Christopher makes his debut in it. Gerald Busby’s score is marvelous.
More than any film I know of it conveys the spirit of the desert — especially the Coccella Valley where much of it was shot.
Justin: I know what you mean, but maybe you don’t love the entire movie so much as you love those two, Pinky Rose and Millie Lammoreaux. (And of course those weird twins that walk through.)
I also liked the males, off on the far horizon but within hearing distance, on there motorcycles. The distant buzz. But I have no idea what this movie was about otherwise. Do you?
Altman kept doing these things, giving us little unforgettable gifts. Even Brewster, a pretty bad movie, was a kid I still love.
Only a couple months ago I saw his one-man, one-act movie-play, Secret Honor. I’d missed it at the time, never heard of it in fact. Philip Baker Hall is Richard Nixon after leaving office, but before the pardon, alone in a room with a bottle of whiskey, a pistol, and a collection of recording equipment. Hall’s Nixon is startling. That Altman was actually able to make a moving picture out of this confinement, amazing.
Yet another weird gift.
David, I didn’t know that about Janice Rule. Another great thing are the murals she paints in the swimming pools. They’re so pagan.
MMoore, I like the riskier, more daring side of Altman, too. The weird gifts as you put it. I love Secret Honor, but then I love Philip Baker Hall. It’s a mesmerizing treatment of Nixon — the most remarkable idea being maybe that Watergate was the official scandal used to cover up a far worse, unofficial one (the plot to kill JFK, I guess).
From the very first shot of 3 Women — that long, ominous tracking shot across the pool that ends in a close-up of Sissy Spacek staring strangely — you know you are entering a different world. If I could hazard any guess at what the movie’s “about,” I’d say that for most of it the women are divided from each other by men, whom they compete for; but at the end of the film, they have achieved a matrilineal solidarity against the opposite sex. But even that feels like too prosaic an explanation.
3 Women, Persona and Mulholland Dr.
One of the best triple features you can set up for yourself.
I’ll add to Brandon’s list the other ‘cult’ Altman classic – Images. To my mind, it is even harder to decipher than 3 Women. Both films showed that Altman, inspite of the inevitable miss here and there, was an adventurous filmmaker who could hold his own with the best of the Europeans – totally uncredited for it in his own country. I must see if I can now re-visit these films, to jog my memory of them.
Justin Biberkopf
I have long suspected that 3 Women is the Altman film I love most. I can’t say it’s as satisfying as Nashville or Short Cuts. I can’t say that I even understand it. But that’s part of what makes it loveable to me. It raggedly is what it is. It’s quirky, goofy, scary, unhinged. It’s like a big colorful art project come to life, and for once I feel like a director isn’t just using desert locales as an empty metaphor. These people exist at the edge of the world. Or do they even exist at all? I think I also love it because he snuck it in under the radar, and he was never able to make such a strange, radical statement again. It’s loveable the same way someone who’s crippled inside can be more loveable than a normal person.
Has anyone noticed the way Shelly Duvall’s coat is always caught in the door of her car when she’s driving?
What theories do people have about the strange turns of the plot, and especially the ending?