More of Nick Millard's inimitable brand of cheapjack arthouse smut, THREES struck me as better than many similar titles, with flourishes of art-student talent and a number of good visual compositions. We join Marilyn walking sadly along a barren San Francisco beach at winter, thinking ruefully back on her failed relationship: a variety of flashbacks, some narratively relevant and some not, make up the rest of the film.
Marilyn was in a "modern marriage" with husband Luis (whom she keeps calling "Lois" about half the time, causing much confusion): he's an erotic writer who keeps a number of chicks on the side, while Marilyn is seeing a Czech exchange student at the local university, who leaves about halfway through when he's discovered spying for the government in a subplot that leads precisely nowhere.
In the absence of the Czech, Marilyn becomes jealous of Luis' dalliances, and attempts to assuage her loneliness by watching a film from his stag collection, allowing Millard to pad the runtime to its still-brisk (not that it feels it) 57 minutes. Speaking of padding, after the couple finally has words, Marilyn stays home to get drunk while Luis heads out to take in a strip show, which drags on endlessly even as the viewer can almost feel the film running out in the projector. As usual with these softcore cheapies, plot is wrapped up hurriedly in the last two minutes, ending in the expected tragedy presaged by the beginning.
Isolated moments stand out: some lovely vintage footage of '60s San Francisco and the interiors of various hippie apartments, a bizarre moment after the fight where Marilyn stands at the door hacking gobs of spit after Luis like she's confused about how to take a home Covid test... There's a part during the striptease where the dancer tries to put her nipple through one of the buttonholes of her blouse, an act she never manages to pull off despite trying for what seems like forever. None of this is particularly good, but one wonders what Millard was up to: there seem to be attempts at things like political commentary via the character of the exchange student, but they're underdeveloped and incoherent. That still counts as showing more effort than later bargain-barrel cash grabs like GUNILLA or WENDY'S NAUGHTY NIGHT, but if that sounds like damning with faint praise, well... it's probably the most the notoriously hacky Millard is apt to receive.
