In a dusty, underpopulated California resort town, a naïve southern waif, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), idolises and befriends her fellow nurse, the would-be sophisticate and “thoroughly modern” Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall). Featuring brilliant performances from Spacek and Duvall, this dreamlike masterpiece from Robert Altman careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s.
Sissy Spacek
Janice Rule
The Ritz, Penzance
The Ritz, Penzance
Reviews
Thoughts
Altman dreamt this film and shot it without a finished script, and it never stops behaving like that. A young woman arrives in a scorched California desert town, takes a job at a spa for the elderly, and attaches herself to a co-worker of ferocious self-invention, a woman narrating her own glamorous life, at length, to a world that does not answer. Then she begins to become her.
It is the season's most unnerving comedy, and its cruellest joke about voice: the running gag, sustained for an hour, is that Millie talks constantly and is heard by nobody, until the one person who does listen turns out to want more than friendship. Attention here is not a kindness. Pair it with Persona and the pattern is unmistakable. A nurse and a patient, an admirer and an idol, and in both cases a self dissolving in a house by water. We thought of including Mullholland Dr to complete the set!
But Altman's world is sunlit, chlorinated and inhabits that liminal version of California that feels so cinematically familiar. And it resolves the way dreams do, by rearrangement rather than by plot. Watch what the murals are doing at the edges of the frame, and a third woman who barely speaks at all.