Images

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

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 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.

An arty horror movie is the last thing one expects from Robert Altman - although, apparently, he had already tried it out with his earlier, little-seen THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK (1969). The writer/director (itself an unusual combination for Altman, but it shows how strongly he felt about the project) himself does not think of it as such and, in any case, reviews at the time were decidedly mixed.

Even if he was "inspired" by Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA (1966), the film actually feels closer plot-wise to Roman Polanski's REPULSION (1965). Originally intended to be shot in Milan with Sophia Loren, the film definitely benefits from its picturesque Irish locations and Susannah York's fragile performance (which eventually earned her the Best Actress Award at Cannes) as a schizophrenic; she, too, was unusually committed and actually allowed a story for kids she had written - called "In Search Of Unicorns" - to be incorporated into the narrative!

The film features only five major characters and, interestingly, these are named after each of the actors themselves: so Susannah York plays Cathryn just as Cathryn Harrison (Rex's daughter, a very natural performer who later featured in another strange film - Louis Malle's BLACK MOON [1975]) plays Susannah; Marcel Bozzuffi's character is named Rene', Rene' Auberjonois is Hugh and Hugh Millais is Marcel! Of course, all this fits perfectly well with the film's theme and the characters' penchant to exchange 'faces' with each other in the mind of the disturbed protagonist; actually, this concept is pretty frightening because the lead character at one point decides to get rid of her 'ghosts' - but, not having a complete grasp on reality, one is never sure whether the victims are mere figments of her imagination or else real people!

Also essential to establishing the film's unique mood is Vilmos Zsigmond's stylish cinematography and John Williams' stark yet evocative score (interspersed with eerie sounds provided by Stomu Yamash'ta, a Japanese sound designer); even though his work here is galaxies away from Williams' renowned anthemic scores for the likes of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, he still managed to earn an Oscar nomination for it!

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.