With 3 Women, Robert Altman demythologizes Bergman, in the same way he demythologized the Western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), the film noir (The Long Goodbye), and other genres. Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek play coworkers and eventual roommates—both named Mildred, but known as Millie and Pinky, respectively—who get caught up in a low-key, doppelganger identity drama. Despite the Persona and Cries and Whispers allusions (as well as a horror-adjacent score by Gerald Busby and surreal, nightmarish water imagery), this still plays like an Altman comedy: wry, character-based, observational. Duvall is particularly good as the (self?) deluded Millie, a liberated modern woman who brags to Pinky about her numerous dates and stacked social calendar but doesn’t seem to notice that no one else pays any attention to her when she’s talking. (My favorite touch on this front: the neighbor who coughs every time she says hello, because she preemptively told him she wouldn’t date him until he got over his cold.) Duvall gives the movie a tragicomic edge; Spacek—with those alien eyes—provides an unsettling tension. And Altman? He lets things float along in his unhurried way, eventually drifting into an amorphous finale involving the third woman—a pregnant painter played by Janice Rule—that if nothing else gestures toward the feminist strain in his filmography.
