Images (1972)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Let's be realistic.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Dear Robert Altman, Images was a relentlessly eerie and occasionally scary film about the mental disintegration of a woman. I liked the atmosphere that you conjured up with the help of the beautiful Irish countryside and John Williams' unusual but ultimately melodic background score. I decided to watch the film because of Susannah York whom I found adorable in The Silent Partner. Images is not the sort of film I would normally watch. I was not enamored by it. It is a psychological horror film that can be compared to Bergman's Persona or Polanski's Repulsion. I would not recommend it to fans of regular horror films. It is quite dumbfounding on occasions - like when Susannah York's character stares at a car arriving at the countryside mansion from atop a hill. And the woman who steps out of the car is well ..... herself. The film continues with the newly arrived York entering the house and going about things. The men (two of whom could be York's hallucinations) in the film are all lecherous and I was thinking that maybe the film might have a feminist message. That York's character might have become damaged by the men in her life. York is sexy as a woman who is in denial about her own sickness and conveys the feeling of disarray perfectly. I am not sure what it all means. But it was engaging because of York's performance, the locale and Williams' score. Best Regards, Pimpin. (6/10)

And my pick is the latter. "Images" seems like an experiment in opaque "art" cinema that Robert Altman just wanted to get out of his system relatively early in his career; so he throws in just about every bizarre shot and incident he can think of, without much regard for internal coherency or logic. The puzzle IN the film gets completed, but the puzzle OF the film never does. The film is similar to the following year's "Don't Look Now"; in both cases you have to sit through a lot of rambling pretentiousness to get to an admittedly memorable shock ending. Susannah York's performance is excellent, but that book she reads aloud from (and apparently wrote herself) should be enough to send any kid or adult to the nearest madhouse! ** out of 4.

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.

Against the backdrop of the beautiful Irish landscape, a writer confronts the demons in her head. Nestled between two of Altman's masterpieces, "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" in 1971 and "The Long Goodbye" in 1973, is this pretentious nonsense from 1972. This is a common trend with Altman, whose films veer from the sublime to the ridiculous. In this, as in "Three Women," Altman seems to be doing a bad Ingmar Bergman impersonation. The script (by Altman and York) and direction are both indulgent and tedious, not to mention the annoying story that York is working on that we are subjected to passages from; the weird score does not help.