After a month of watching (and in most cases re-watching) adventure movies, I decided to dip back into the Criterion Collection for something different and got Robert Altman's 3 Women, I've seen very few Altman films (I only remember seeing Nashville and A Prairie Home Companion) but 3 Women is his Ingmar Bergman inspired psychodrama with Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek. Like Persona, it is about two women getting in close proximity and their identities shift and merge but this takes it more as a launching pad rather than just a pastiche (though the music feels very much like what you would expect from a Bergman movie).
Spacek and Duvall are very good at playing two very awkward people, albeit in different ways. Duvall is a lonely woman who talks exclusively about banal trivia and food (I can relate) to everyone else's disinterest, like she is desperately trying to be interesting to a heavy flop sweat degree. Meanwhile, Spacek is ridiculously childish for her age (she's playing younger than Duvall but is acting like a 9 year old for a lot of the movie) and she thinks Duvall's character is the bee's knees,. the coolest person ever... and begins emulating her in a way that would be charming for a kid but weird for a grown-up (even a young grown-up). The two move in together and it is clear there's something... deceptive about both. But in mostly ways that don't seem overtly sinister. More like they are trying to put on airs or seem impressive. Spacek is a little moreso, childishly reading Duvall's diary or taking small things from her.
But at the midway point, something happens that shifts things and Spacek's mimicry gets more aggressive and moves from "sincerest form of flattery" to "I'm going to be you, but better." And things get murkier from there. I think I actually like this film better than persona, though I feel like even though the ambiguous ending is ambiguous there's something about it that feels a little too... arch, for lack of a better word? Maybe a little too trying to impress with something impactful. But I still like the film. It's the kind that is fun to play with in your heard afterward, trying to unpack it but is also vague enough to not easily spell everything out. But the best is those performances.
