I saw "3 Women" in 1977. I went back to the cinema and saw it two more times, before I wrote a review. Though I have seen it many other times since then, today I do not recall every detail. Nevertheless I remember its story dealt with three women whose solidarity allows them to survive in a world dominated by insensitive men. Two of these women move the story, the third one does not have a direct influence on the events, but she is a key figure. There is no puzzle here, no enigma to decipher. It may be based on Robert Altman's dream, it may have a dream sequence, but it is quite linear and direct, with little relation to dreams' structure (or lack of it). I say this today but after finding my review in my files, I think it's ironic and makes me laugh at myself. By 1977 I had not read Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" yet and I was trying to decipher what the butter meant in "Last Tango in Paris". But I must admit that I find interesting some of the research I did and a few interpretations I made. I found then various leitmotivs in the movie: first, the grotesquely erotic murals painted and shot at by Willie (Janice Rule), that illustrate the oppressive situation of woman in phallocratic societies; water, which (according to French philosopher Dane Rudhyar) stands for collective consciousness and astral world, a symbol that for me tacitly connected the three women (and that has played an important role in other Altman films: "McCabe & Mrs. Miller", "Streamers", "Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean", "The Gingerbread Man", "Dr. T & the Women", frozen in "Quintet", and even in "HealtH", "Popeye" and "O.C. and Stiggs"); the image of twins Peggy and Polly, duplicated in Alcira and Doris, mirroring the Millie-Pinky duplicity; and the clinic, as a metaphor of social and moral decay while its members attempt at efficiency. It may sound crazy but I even made a connection between the pool of the boarding house (owned by Willie) and a woman's womb (Willie's), where the temporary symbiosis of Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek) into Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) takes place. Today I consider all these more hints than cryptic data, and sometimes they are even too obvious –as the line when Millie says something like "Sometimes Peggy can be Polly, and Polly can be Peggy", gun-crazy Edgar as a symbol of sexual inadequacy and male authoritarianism, and the delivery of the dead child as a metaphor of the sterility of this kind of relationship between men and women. As I remember it today, it is a sad story of female bonding as a means of survival in a consumerist society, narrated in a beautiful cinematic style, with remarkable performances by all. (Funny, although Duvall had won the Best Actress Palm d'Or in Cannes, in my review the one who impressed me the most was Rule, because she was able to transmit so much with less than a dozen of lines). By far, it's my favorite Robert Altman movie and one of his masterpieces.