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The mystery of American loneliness, a suit of images à la Deren. Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), "always the fallin' one," pale and puerile, blowing bubbles in drinks. "Thoroughly Modern Millie" (Shelley Duvall) in her yellow den, a vapid whirlwind of gummy recipes and imaginary beaus. The meeting at the health spa sets up the aquatic motif, everybody floating and churning in private worlds, the joke is that it's a desert, California out of Texas. "Dodge City" for the dilapidated watering hole, "Purple Sage Apartments" for the disconnected commune. They become roommates, "you're the most perfect person I've ever met," not Persona but All About Eve. The Beckettian rupture is a plunge in the swimming pool, the mouse emerges from a coma rather like the chatterbox, who withdraws. "I wonder what it's like to be twins... Maybe they switch back and forth." The culmination of Robert Altman's oneiric side dating back to That Cold Day in the Park, a woozy aquarium tilted this way and that. (One of the heroines voices a different stylistic encapsulation: "A sand painting with bullet holes.") Mirrors, undulating reflections, baleful reptilian murals courtesy of the third woman (Janice Rule), the artist speechless and pregnant. Masculine things, dirt motorbiking and range shooting and the drunk stuntman (Robert Fortier), a cowboy in his own mind. Dependency and transference, identity but also the creative process, cinema by any other name. Geriatric parents (John Cromwell, Ruth Nelson) in a wrinkle from Rosemary's Baby, Dad is the director of The Goddess, appropriately not recognized. Stillborn boy, dispatched husband, the new family. "La dame pour faire semblant / Dans une piscine éternelle" (Mallarmé). Altman's miraculous trance, nothing like it except Skolimowski's The Shout. (Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is a surreptitious reconfiguration.) Cinematography by Charles Rosher Jr. With Sierra Pecheur, Craig Richard Nelson, Maysie Hoy, Belita Moreno, and Leslie and Patricia Ann Hudson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |