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Images Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 8 Reviews)

Impressionistic Ensemble Piece
Images is a long-lost classic that, thankfully, has been rescued from oblivion. I remember seeing it when I was still a teenager and thinking it a work of art. Susannah York proves, once again, that she was one of the great 60s actresses---nervous and intelligent, and full of that fragile sensibility that charcterised the time. Loved her in Sebastian, but this was her film, the film that really gave her a chance to show what she could do. The book that she is writing throughout the film and that forms the accompaniment to her madness was actually written by York herself. Serious and adult, this and Three Women is Altman's pinnacle as an artist, if not as an entertainer.

Photographed by Vilmos Zsigmund. with an impressive score by John Williams, this is one of great films of the period. It easily stands alongside Five Easy Pieces. American cinema was competing with Europe on its own terms, at this time, and holding its own---but then it all came crashing in when marketing took over and cinema lost its soul for good. (Thank Star Wars, and Jaws and similar blockbusters.)

Fascinating Psychological Portrait
Susannah York gives a fantastic performance as Cathryn, a wealthy English woman who may be mentally unstable. Alone in her home writing a children's book, she is interrupted by the apparent appearance of an old lover. Or is she? When her husband (Rene Aberjonois) arrives home and sees her distress, he whisks her away to their country home - a strangely drab cottage that seems to have been spray-painted black and gray. Her deterioration and inability to distinguish fact and fantasy continue unabated, particularly when her husband has to return to the city. What happens from there is highly open to interpretation.

"Images" is a strange, unsettling film, even for director Robert Altman. The initial pace is glacier-like and will undoubtedly leave many viewers bored and frustrated. However, you need to stick with it, as the film gradually gains momentum and climaxes with almost unbearable tension. The film has been compared to Roman Polanski's "Repulsion"; that film is superior to "Images," but the comparison is not completely inappropriate. Both chronicle a young woman's descent in madness when left alone; however, "Images" is less chilling and somewhat more convoluted, although with many merits of its own.

Filmed on location in Ireland, the film looks absolutely stunning, and the cinematography is so superior that it alone merits a viewing of "Images." Altman's direction is also first-rate and masterful, so much so that it somewhat detracts from the film - I was sometimes too busy watching his directing flourishes to pay attention to small plot details. Overall, "Images" is an intriguing movie-going experience that will likely appeal to many fans of Altman and viewers who appreciate films that can be obscure in nature.



Ambitious thriller that fails due to heavy handedness.
'Images' is one of those films with a big reputation that has always been quite difficult to get to see.

I read about this film in the excellent 'DVD Delerium Volume 2' book -and if you love real cult movies then you must get these books kids - and it sounded fascinating: a woman lapsing into schizophrenia keeps hallucinating (or does she), seeing and hearing people from her past who are/are not really there.

The seventies was a particularly great time for such films ('Blood Sisters' and 'Symptoms' are two classic examples), but despite its ambition, 'Images' does not quite hang together.

Susannah York is excellent and the photography (the film is mostly set in Ireland) is generally breathtaking, while the quality of the DVD itself varies, though this may be down to deliberate grain in some scenes. But the film itsel lacks tautness, being a good fifteen minutes too long and it is too heavily laden with intention - the music, by John Williams (before he became boring) and the brilliant Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamashta (whose best music features heavily in Roeg's 'The Man Who Fell To Earth'-and all of this music has never been issued on CD, which is a disgrace) is excellent but there is far too much of it and after a while its disturbing qualities become tedious. Together with the generally poor mono sound, fairytale voiceover monologues from York and the cardboard supporting characters ( a husband who cannot keep saying 'goddamn it' and 'son of a bitch' repeatedly while wearing driving gloves, a brutish Oliver Tobias type artist who gropes at York constantly and a largely indecipherable French ex-lover), the merits of the film become lost in its excessive carping on the same points without moving the story along. The mono sound is poor particularly during York's monologues and the French guys' inaudible mutterings (harden those consonants, man !)

Don't get me wrong, I like obsessive film- makers -Argento, Cronenberg, Roeg, Leone and Kubrick all fascinate me, no matter how overblown or repetitive they become, but against directors like these, Altman just does not cut it.

I can't say I'm an Altman fan (I have seen a few of his pictures and don't really see what the fuss is about him -unlike many auteurs who are at their best when repeatedly focussing on their personal obsessions, Altman has cast his net far and wide with the result that his directorial character is somewhat vague and undefinied -in other words, he could just be a superior Hollywood hack). Proof of this comes in his endless focussing on depending pendant-like baubles throughout the film, which seems to be the limit of his 'Images' imagination.

In short, with some judicious editing and improved sound, this could have been a great film. But Altman is not Roeg, (...). Otherwise, worth having only for the lovely photography.

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