Rating: 4/5
I won’t be able to finish this puzzle — there’s too many pieces missing
Cathryn (Susannah York) is talking to a friend on the phone when another voice comes on, claiming to be someone sleeping with her husband, Hugh (René Auberjonois). When he comes home — having not slept with someone else — to find her distraught, they decide to go to Cathryn’s family home in the country for some rest
Whether this Cathryn makes it there, we aren’t sure, as the camera jumps from the Cathryn we’ve been following, standing on a cliff, to another Cathryn unpacking the car and moving in
Compression of space and memory begins as Cathryn sees Hugh transform into a French lover René (Marcel Bozzuffi), who may or may not have existed, and back again. Hugh runs into Marcel (Hugh Millais) and his daughter Susannah (Cathryn Harrison). Marcel continues to make advances on her, and Susannah bears more than a passing resemblance to Cathryn’s childhood photos
Susannah plays Cathryn, Cathryn plays Susannah, René plays Hugh, Hugh plays Marcel, and Marcel plays René
Throughout the movie, Cathryn recites a children’s book in her head — one we, the audience, believe she is writing. The words, however, are from Susannah York’s book, In Search of Unicorns
First and foremost, the movie is about doubling and identity and the parts of ourselves that we try to hide away but manifest in other ways
Most readings over the movie treat Cathryn’s behavior as a form of schizophrenia. While I think that works — and that the film, by design, doesn’t have one interpretation — I read it in a less literal form
I see Cathryn as a woman afraid her husband might be cheating on her because he doesn’t sleep with her anymore, and she has a history of infidelity that he doesn’t know about, so the fear that Hugh may find out haunts her. It gets in the way of her loving her husband the way she wants to
While I like a lot about this movie, I think that Altman’s later approach to these concepts, 3 Women, is more successful as a multifaceted, interpretive piece. Unlike this movie, where reality peels apart, 3 Women sees the world fully transformed and sublimated to something wholly other
The score is eerie and edgy, in large part because the collaboration between John Williams and Stomu Yamashta fits together in such an unusual way, one canceling out the other, negating, merging, compressing
Good stuff!