3 Women
Pinky Rose, a timid and awkward young woman, begins a job at a health spa for the elderly in a small California desert town. There, she becomes enamored of Millie Lammoreaux, a confident and talkative employee. Both natives of Texas, the two begin to develop a friendship and, in spite of their stark personality differences, decide to become roommates. Pinky moves in with Millie at the Purple Sage Apartments, owned by a has-been cowboy, Edgar Hart, and his wife Willie, a mysterious pregnant woman who paints striking and unsettling murals.
Millie takes Pinky along on her evening visits to Dodge City, a local tavern and shooting range also owned by Willie, where Millie talks incessantly. Tensions begin to rise between Pinky and Millie over their living situation. One night, when Millie prepares a dinner party for friends who fail to show up, she gets into a fight with Pinky and leaves the apartment, only to return with a drunk Edgar, and the two have sex. Pinky, distraught, jumps off the apartment balcony into the swimming pool.
Pinky survives the suicide attempt but goes into a coma. Millie, feeling responsible, begins to visit Pinky daily. When Pinky still doesn't wake up, Millie contacts and invites Pinky's parents in Texas to see if their presence will awaken her. She wakes up, but does not recognize her parents and furiously demands that they leave. Once sent home to live with Millie again, Pinky begins to exhibit increasingly uncharacteristic behaviors— she begins drinking and smoking, has an affair with Edgar, insists on being called "Mildred," and spends her time at the shooting range, just as Millie had.
Millie becomes increasingly frustrated by Pinky's imitative shift in personality, and begins to exhibit Pinky's timid and submissive personality herself. One night after Pinky has a bad dream, represented through an abstract montage of Millie crying and Willie's bizarre murals, a drunk Edgar enters their apartment and awakens them, initially making moves on Pinky before casually telling them that Willie is about to give birth. The two drive to Edgar and Willie's farmhouse, where Willie is alone and in labor. Her baby is stillborn, as Pinky does not seek medical help during the delivery as Millie told her to. Millie slaps Pinky in anger.
The film ends with Pinky and Millie, who are now working at Dodge City; a delivery vendor at the tavern refers to Edgar's "gun accident" when talking to Millie, who seems unaffected by it. Pinky appears to have reverted to her childlike timidity; she refers to Millie as her mother. Pinky and Millie leave the tavern and walk to Willie's farmhouse, where the three begin to prepare dinner together. The final shot pans to a pile of tires buried in the dirt, implied to be Edgar's resting place.
psychedelic, satire, atmospheric