3 Women

“I wonder what it’s like to be twins. Do you think they know which one they are?” Sissy Spacek’s Pinky Rose asks her eventual roommate Millie – played by an improvising Shelley Duvall – who fails to take the question for the warning that it is.

One of Altman’s most hallucinatory creations, 3 Women was conceived from a dream he had of Duvall and Spacek in the desert, starring in a film about “personality-theft.” Twins and doublings haunt the edges of 3 Women, as Pinky’s infatuation with Millie, a fellow worker at a therapeutic spa for the elderly, takes an obsessive turn. Meanwhile, the ‘third’ woman lurks in the background, expressing herself silently and potently through mythic paintings and mosaics depicting a domineering patriarchy. Ultimately, the triangulated transference of personas reflects a malleability of sense of self which can be by turns sinister and liberatory. In this unpredictable hall of mirrors, Altman’s characteristic multi-track audio soundscaping creates a muffled, almost underwater effect, reflecting the film’s uncanny surreality, rather than the seamless naturalism for which he was known.

– Harvard Film Archive