Spiegelbilder

This is one of the most compelling films I've seen in a long time. I wasn't sure if I was in the mood for a serious "psychological thriller" but this movie held my rapt attention until the very end. A brilliant example of just how talented Robert Altman is as a filmmaker. While most people pigeonhole him as "that guy who makes the movies with the large ensemble casts and lots of overlapping dialogue", this movie finds him working with a cast of six, and most of the action takes place within the heroine's head. Beautiful (of course) photography by Vilmos Zsigmond is just the icing on the cake. Don't miss this forgotten treasure by an American master.

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.

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.

Robert Altman applies the same widescreen canvas he had previously used to capture the chaotic communities of a Korean War MASH unit and a primitive Pacific Northwest mining town to the quieter but no less chaotic internal workings of a troubled woman's psyche in this unsettling and uneven psychological thriller.

Susannah York plays Cathryn, wife of a distracted husband (Rene Auberjonois), whose affairs with two men (one a family friend) and her inability to have children become obsessive memories that haunt her and drive her over the brink of insanity during a stay at a quiet country home (the country is never identified, though the movie was filmed in Ireland). She begins the film as a wounded and hunted animal, jumping at every sound and image she hears or sees. One of her past lovers appears as a ghost, the other arrives at the country home with his daughter and gropes Cathryn when her husband's back is turned. The two lovers are vaguely threatening and abusive; her husband is dismissive and treats her like a child. Cathryn realizes that she can take control and kill off her unpleasant memories -- but at the same time she loses the ability to distinguish between reality and her own feverish imaginings.

On a first viewing, "Images" is absorbing and oddly fascinating, but it doesn't hold up well. For one, Cathryn isn't a compelling character, and that dooms the project from the start, since there's barely a scene in the film that doesn't revolve around her. She begins the film unhinged and really has nowhere to go from there except more unhinged. We don't learn much about her, and her illness isn't placed in any context. Susannah York delivers a shrill performance, all screeches and irrational outbursts; the male characters all come across as asses. Altman seems to be trying his hand at a feminist text, but he goes about it in the clichéd way that male artists too often address "female" issues. I think he's making some point about the way movies objectify women, turning them into "images" for the consumption of male viewers. After all, Cathryn is little more than something for the men in the film to enjoy, and cameras figure prominently in the film's mise-en-scene (Cathryn's husband is an amateur photographer). At one point, she fires one of her husband's guns (that universal symbol of male sexual power) at the ghost of her dead lover, and finds that she has instead destroyed her husband's camera. Nice try Altman, but awfully heavy handed if you ask me.

I'm a champion of Robert Altman's films, and he's never failed to fascinate me with any of his experiments, but such is the nature of experimenting that some are going to succeed more than others. "Images" came on the heels of a marvelous trio of films ("MASH," "Brewster McCloud" and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller") with which Altman announced his arrival as an important figure in American cinema, and he would follow it with four more ("The Long Goodbye," "Thieves Like Us," "California Split" and "Nashville") that would reinforce that claim, but "Images" itself is a weak link in the chain.

The stars of "Images" are the mesmerizing production design and the sterling cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond.

Grade: B

"Images" is another great movie from the master of the living paintings, Robert Altman. It is a brilliant, scary, beautiful, and very disturbing journey inside one woman's mind that was leaving her as the movie progressed. What we saw was not a ghost story but a very real descent to the world of nightmares and monsters that would not stop torturing the struggling and guilty mind for a second.

Susannah York as Cathryn, a young, beautiful writer who tries to finish a children's book in a remote country home is simply breathtaking. She carries the movie (which only has five characters) almost by herself and being present in every scene, she is equally sympathetic and frightening. In his interview on DVD, Altman mentioned that he had started making the movie in Milan with Sophia Lauren. As much as I admire Lauren, I don't see anyone other than York playing Cathryn. While watching her, I kept thinking of her Alice in Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). Alice, one of the participants and victims of a killing dance marathon, loses her mind by the end of the movie and the scene where she breaks down mentally, was heartbreaking. Altman himself reminded me of the witches from Shakespeare's Macbeth that would throw all kinds of ingredients in their cauldron. The director mentioned how he would add the new details to the script as the real life situations changed: York was writing the children's book about Unicorns at the time - we can hear the long parts of her book in the background. I am not too crazy about the book but the idea seems to be brilliant. York had informed Altman that she could not make the movie because she was pregnant but Altman just decided to add her pregnancy to the script. There is some dry humor in the movie - all five characters have the first names of the actors who played them: Susannah played Cathryn and young Cathryn Harrison plays a girl named Susannah, Rene Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi, and Hugh Millais played three men in Cathryn's life - Hugh, the husband, Rene - the neighbor, and Marcel, her dead lover (who was quite alive for a dead man, at least in her memory). John Williams wrote an absolutely unforgettable score for the film (it is not a melody, rather some strange, persistent, scary, and disturbing sounds - very experimental at the time, it is still quite unusual).

As for its visual site - the film that was made during one wet November in Ireland is brilliantly dark and hypnotizingly beautiful. I am jealous of everyone who was able to see it in all its glory on the big screen at the theater - it would be impossible to forget.

8/10