3 WOMEN

The 3 women of the title are Millie, Pinky and Willie. Millie and Pinky work together at a health spa for the elderly and the infirm and share an apartment. Willie is an an artist and she never speaks. Millie speaks all the time but no-one listens to her, no-one that is except Pinky who idolises her and would like to be her. Yes, this is Altman's "Persona" with a third woman thrown in for good measure and it's a darkly comic masterpiece.

Altman says he based his screenplay on a dream he had and the film does have a dream-like hallucinatory quality. As Millie and Pinky, Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek are virtually never off the screen and they are superb. Duvall won the Best Actress award at Cannes and Spacek won the New York Film Critics Best Supporting Actress prize. The terrific and disquieting score is by Gerald Busby.