While I like a lot of what Ingmar Bergman has created (and feel equally frustrated by a lot of what’s within his work), I do not like his influence in cinema, which seemed particularly prevalent amongst American filmmakers in the 1970s. Bergman, it seems to me, was every bit as patchy as Robert Altman has been in his career, and this film — an avowedly dream-based rendering of relationships amongst three women (well, primarily two really: Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall) seemingly inspired by some kind of Bergmanesque mood of Scandinavian disaffection, as well as psychoanalytic ideas — feels like a copy. A lot of people seem to love it, but I can’t find much to love really, but they seem to be tapping into an emotional range that I think would take me more processing to grasp. The performances are great, but the core relationships seem indebted to over-familiar mother/whore dichotomies, and the alienating score is (perhaps appropriately, of course) suffocating.
FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Robert Altman; Cinematographer Chuck Roscher; Starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janice Rule; Length 124 minutes.
Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 11 November 2018.
filmcentric 