1977, USA
Armed with powerhouse performances by Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, 3 Women is a film whose provocative schizophrenia is both gripping and contagious.
While its horror elements are atmospheric more than overt, the film is a literal sea of doubles that involves a persona-switching trio of women.
Spacek plays Pinky Rose, the obtuse new girl working at a surreal geriatric water-therapy centre where she meets her soon-to-be roommate Millie Lammoreaux (Duvall).
Millie is everything Pinky isn’t: glamorous, confident, in Pinky’s words, “perfect”.
But Millie’s projected confidence is a sham, and in Pinky, Millie finally receives the captive audience she needs in order to keep up her illusion of social adeptness, while Pinky gets a role model, however questionable.
Millie longs for male attention and finally gets it in the form of their lecherous landlord Edgar, whose pregnant wife Willie (Janice Rule, the third woman) spends her days wordlessly painting serpentine murals along the walls of the compound’s pool.
When Pinky tries to drown herself in the pool, bewitched by the murals that line its sides, she ends up in a coma, and emerges as a new woman, the first of many transformations through which the three women transgress the laws of identity and come to exist as three parts of the same mind.
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