Images

This film does not represent what Altman is well-known for - community mosaic or documentary style films such as "MASH", "Nashville", and "A Prairie Home Companion". Instead, Altman extended what he tried in "That Cold Day In the Park (1969)" depicting the inner world of a psychopathic woman, but his approach here is more complex. In fact, the fragmented style of the film is quite appropriate to portrait the shuttered mind of heroine.

The use of sound and the twin image of the character somewhat reminded me of "Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)" by Maya Deren. However, the visual style of this film is distinctively the seventies - beautifully shot by Vilmos Zsigmond. A mesmerizing film.

Robert Altman isn't a director that you would usually associate with the horror genre - but that was what made this film all the more intriguing for yours truly. However, while Altman takes obvious influence from Roman Polanski's Repulsion - an idea good enough to spawn a good horror film and ambiguous enough to be given a different slant to the original - Altman's film really didn't do much for me. The plot concerns Cathryn; a housewife who visits a 'weekend cottage' with her husband. However, while at this tranquil location; she begins seeing various apparitions, and proceeds to kill them off one by one. The film slots into the 'slow burn horror' niche, and while this sort of film can often produce good results, this one doesn't generate a great deal of interest and as intrigue is key to the plot, it all falls down. The film deserves some plaudits for the fact that it's all of a very high quality; Altman's direction is generally strong and he gets good performances out of his cast, but this doesn't count for much when the film moves at a snail's pace. Images tends to get good ratings across the board, so perhaps I've missed something and my criticism is misplaced - but I doubt it!

I have spent a grown lifetime seeking this 1972 Altman dreamscape, and lost all hope when a friend reported that the director told a Q-and-A audience that Columbia had mistakenly destroyed the negative. A specialty store in Santa Monica somehow found a video copy, and it was worth fifteen years' wait.

Suggestive of the tinkling, misted-over fugue states of QUINTET and THREE WOMEN, IMAGES riffs lyrically off Polanski's REPULSION. Where Polanski's film is pitched somewhere between sixties horror and the dry joke-telling of Bunuel, Altman's version is lush, druglike, sensuously baroque. Susannah York plays a children's writer in a remote Irish cottage who seems to be spending too much time indoors. (Were the movie not lost in obscurity, you might think her an antecedent for Jack Torrance and Barton Fink.) As she copes with the would-be-regular-guy puttering of her schmucky husband (Rene Auberjonois, in a role rightly intended for Michael Murphy), two other loathsome men flit into her life--the husband's buddy, an Irish lecher played by Hugh Millais, and a seemingly dead ex-lover, played by Marcel Bozzufi. As these men appear to bleed into one another in York's mind, so do they soon start bleeding into the cottage's Persian rugs.

IMAGES defines Altman as the freest and most fearless of all American moviemakers. Most critics only stand behind Altman's we-are-the-people movies--his community mosaics. But he clearly is as passionate about mapping inner worlds as outer ones, and these Expressionist chamber pieces are his most feckless works. The movie is also a reminder of what Altman lost when he stopped hiring Vilmos Zsigmond to shoot his movies. Almost no one on the planet has such an intuitively graceful and expressive shooting style, but Zsigmond's stunning work here--among his finest--reveals that it's a long walk downstairs from Zsigmond to the likes of Jean Lapine. And note should be made of the work of the youngish composer who wrote the elegant, sinewy, restrained score--a decidedly non-bombastic, anti-symphonic fellow whom we now know as John Williams.

This is a a film I'll definitely watch again. I have the feeling it could feel even stronger on repeated viewings. A character study of a schizophrenic from inside her subjective point of view, so the whole story is told by an unreliable narrator. Some fascinating moments, and good tense twists as we (and she) wonder what's real. The film isn't wildly stylized, so the line between hallucination and reality is truly, effectively blurry. On the other hand a lot of the style feels awkwardly dated, and some story elements feel manipulative and not easy to believe. For example, she's very obviously a potentially dangerously disturbed woman, but her husband seems to barely take that in. Even if he's the supercilious prig that Rene Abougenois plays him as, his complete ignoring of her state feels like a cheat. And some twists just feel like they were 'a cool idea' at the time, but not rooted in deeper character or story elements. A little like Nic Roeg, but not at his very best. All that said, certainly a must see for any Altman fans - it's not quite like anything else he ever did - although '3 Women' could be seen in some ways as a more mature follow up.

Altman's little-seen psychological thriller, "Images," takes on the plot of a woman working on a children's book. One night, she receives a series of mysterious phone calls from a woman who tells her that her husband is cheating on her. After the probability of this is dismissed, she retreats to a country farmhouse with her husband to work, where she is visited by a series of people from her past, as the line between reality and fantasy is continually blurred.

Perhaps less thick with dream fog than "3 Women" but ten times more unnerving, "Images" is a film that truly hasn't gotten the audience it deserves. It's two parts art film and two parts psychological horror, while Altman toes the line the entire way through. Taking cues from Ingmar Bergman as well as Polanski, it's an incredibly bizarre film, especially when taken as a cohesive piece; but the real strength of it lies in the effective cinematography and the successive sequences that could almost stand as monumental short films all on their own. Slick cinematography amplifies the reality (or unreality) of the film, with characters changing bodies between shots, and Cathryn's husband walking through a swinging door only to return as her dead ex-lover.

It's precisely this jarring technique that really make this work as a horror film and elicit true moments of shock and fear; we don't know what to expect from one moment to the next, just as Cathryn doesn't. It's a film of doubling, identity, and hallucination— Cathryn sits at the bottom of a waterfall writing, while the camera pans down river to Cathryn sitting on the edge of a bluff, watching herself write. Which Cathryn is the "real" Cathryn? Who is Cathryn? Is her ex- lover dead? Why have her husband's friend and his doppelgänger daughter come to visit? It's the these questions that haunt the audience throughout, and remain with you after the shocking final scene.

Many have referred to "Images" as a portrait, even Altman himself, and I can think of no more accurate description. In many ways, it is a series of portraits; shards of a broken mirror that are haphazardly put back together. It's one of the most haunting and obscure films of the '70s, brimming with atmosphere, lush cinematography, and truly effective recreations of the schizophrenic mind. Susannah York's performance as Cathryn is the icing on the cake here, full of vulnerability and incognizant power. Fans of bleak psychological films will be particularly rewarded here, as well as admirers of Bergman and Altman alike. 9/10.