I think that I first saw 3 Women in a Robert Altman season on TV in 1996 and it is one of those films that has stayed in my mind long after the 'plots' of other films disappeared from my memory. Having just been wowed by A Wedding earlier in the season and beginning to feel comfortable with the expectations of 'Altman' equalling 'ensemble', 3 Women knocked me off balance. It also felt as if I saw the film in the perfect conditions: late at night in the middle of a hot summer which complemented mood of the film - the shimmering heat haze contrasted against refreshing and cooling dips into water.
Back in 1996 I saw the film in pan and scan form, though it was very difficult to be sure at the time whether it was in the correct ratio or not! I didn't have the Internet then to easily check those kinds of details and with the constant panning and zooming throughout the film I found it difficult to figure out whether the picture was cropped or not. The Criterion disc was my first experience of the film in its correct ratio, and it was nice to see the compositions in the way they were intended (off centred characters, such as the introduction of Pinky in the Hydrotherapy Clinic, when they were nicely centred in the pan and scan print; the wide open spaces emphasising the distances the characters have to walk to reach each other; the full view of the murals; the little blue wave machine that feels designed for the widescreen ratio!; and so on)
It has been a while since I last watched the film (though this discussion has inspired me to sit down with it again this weekend!), but I have to admit to feeling uncomfortably close to Millie. I can certainly identify with the kind of nervousness where you talk just to fill up the air, trying to keep up an air of joviality and lightness to cover up the fear of what will happen if you stop talking - not that you'll be treated badly but that nobody will have even cared to listen.
I feel very sorry for Millie because she is keeping up appearances and doing everything she 'should do', but is doing it for others rather than herself in the hopes that this will make her successful or liked when ironically it is driving people away from her and turning her into a pitiable figure. The other minor characters, from the work'mates' at the Hydrotherapy Clinic to the doctors in the restaurant and the guys around the pool at the apartment complex, even the officious nurse who gruffly asks who she is when she comes to see Pinky with the girl's parents, are rather broadly characterised as unsympathetic. Normally I hate broadly drawn unsympathetic characters as being a shortcut for a filmmaker looking to create easy sympathy for our main characters (see Million Dollar Baby!), but I think it works here. It not only creates sympathy as the world seems to have rejected our characters as damaged long before they realise it themselves, but it also suggests the generally hostile attitude of the world to strangers when they sense someone in need. When someone expresses no interest (as Pinky does with her badass attitude after waking from her coma), people seem to come flocking!
I also think it is interesting that Millie relates best with older or younger characters, whereas in the company of people of a similar age she seems out of place (either treated badly by her employers, where
she seems like a child; or disdainfully by the people at the apartments, where she seems like an older person desperately trying to 'get down and groove with the kids')
Millie's attempt at maturity is mainly sexual at first and it is her desperation that drives her to bring Edgar back to the apartment for a one night stand. She has sunk to the bottom and also feels able to take out her anger on Pinky - I feel in an act of self hatred, because if she is worthless then Pinky, by being with her and looking up to her, must be even less than she is (in a way she acts in that scene the way that the unsympathetic minor characters do to her!)
She might drive Pinky to attempt suicide (though I'm not sure I would call it suicide - more on that later) but at the same time Pinky's 'accident' saves Millie. It cuts short her relations with Edgar (I would disagree with Gregory here that Willie has her extreme reaction to Pinky but instead she has the reaction from seeing first Millie then Edgar coming down the stairs from the apartment. She's put two and two together at that point and the scene which follows of her watching Pinky in the hospital is a kind of acknowledgement and understanding of why Pinky fell/jumped into the pool), and given Millie a chance to prove her maturity in non-sexual terms. This is where the film shifts from Pinky's point of view gazing at Millie to the exact opposite of Millie watching Pinky. I find it heartbreaking that Millie's maturity in finding Pinky's parents, standing up for her at the Hydrotherapy Clinic and then quitting in sympathy coincides and is completely overshadowed by Pinky's own growth from girl into teen. Any thanks Millie may have expected from the doe-eyed Pinky is absent.
I kind of think of the next section as the Single White Female part of the film! I feel that Pinky, who so looked up to and read Millie's journal, is changed after the coma into someone who is combining Pinky's impressions of what Millie was like from her public persona (the face Millie was presenting to the world and in her diary of an outgoing, sexy, fun loving, and well liked person) but is doing it with far more success than Millie ever managed! That must be devastating, to have someone else succeed at being 'you' better than you could!
Also in this section the diary scenes remind me of the phrase that people write diaries to be read, there is no point in writing them otherwise. The early scene of Millie writing her diary seems to show another reason for writing - to reinforce your persona. Perhaps if she writes about her life in exciting and happy terms perhaps it will
turn her life into something better than it is (I also like the emphasis on Pinky's writing mimicky in that scene). Pinky is a perfect audience for Millie's self-aggrandisement in those early scenes but becomes a hybrid after coming out of her coma. I love the scene of Millie reading Pinky's diary, in a counterpoint of the earlier scene, where it becomes apparent that Pinky has also taken on board the rejection Millie dealt out to her in the earlier section and incorporated that into a disdain for Millie, and wish to see
her leave the apartment now!
Edgar is the element that ties all three characters together - he has made Willie pregnant, Millie attempts to have sex with him, Pinky once she takes on Millie's fantasy characteristics succeeds in that attempt.
I get the impression that the ending is a comment on Millie being the lucky one - Willie is defined by her relationship with Edgar, as partner, pregnant wife, bereaved and bereft widow (the body). Pinky vacilates between shyly deferent femininity and gun toting vixen before becoming truly childish (the mind, in the sense that a persona is a mental construction). Millie in that final scene is neither - or maybe both in balance and not taken to extremes. She's the motherly figure without having had sex and the daughter without, well, having had sex! (I think there is a big theme of fascination with, and fear of, sex in the film. The shock of older people enjoying the act; the feeling that everyone is having sex around the pool but you and you are being left out somehow; the sharing of a single man in Edgar)
I also saw some parallels to characters in J.G. Ballard's works (I promise this will be the last time I shoehorn him into a topic, but he really seems to have a novel or short story to cover most issues!), of characters who are dissatisfied with their world and take bizarre, even transgressive, steps to make the world make sense to them.
I particularly liked the water theme in the film. It feels as if the film is illustrating a life cycle (backwards) through water - beginning with the hydrotherapy pool for the elderly, through the barren pool at the back of the bar and the full swimming pool surrounded by young adults at the apartments, to the wave machine toy a child would play with. It all seems to be leading towards the baby in the womb, soon to be stillborn.
For me Willie seems at first to be orchestrating the action through the murals in the pool at the apartment or the empty pool, as if she were a sorceress performing a kind of ritual. The way that the murals at times appear to be commenting on the action seems to suggest this, and I particularly like the way that Willie is shown stirring the water in the pool at the apartment before Millie brings Edgar back and Pinky has her 'accident' in the pool. It is as if Willie herself is stirring the events up to a climactic point (this again is very like Ballard, where characters produce strange objects or diagrams, or put mundane things into a new order in an attempt to either understand or prepare for a transformative event. There is even a short story by Ballard set in an empty pool which brought 3 Women to mind as soon as I read it!).
However as the film goes on Willie herself seems not to be the orchestrater but someone seeming to act as if under compulsion, as if she is driven by an unknown need to create her murals (otherwise known as the artistic impulse!
). Could the figures be protectors or demons? (maybe both, and could compare to the way a gun brings a feeling of safety and protection yet also has the potential to cause much greater damage).
By the end I think we are meant to feel shocked by how strange the world the characters are in has become from the seemingly mundane and grounded reality of the early part of the film, but in a sense the three women have restructured their world to work for them whereas before everything seemed to be 'correct' but was conspiring against them in many different ways. They've "kicked the last male off the rock" and have created an insular, unsustainable, even insane world, but isn't that the world in a nutshell?
