Images
Director: Robert Altman
Year Released: 1972
Rating: 1.5
Dry, academic attempt at psychological storytelling made to feel like a dry, academic movie by director Altman and star Susannah York (who helped write the screenplay) – it goes to show that novel-esque ideas about identity confusion sometimes make for poor faux-Bergman drama. Altman claims it has to do with the heroine's schizophrenia, although something tells me neither he nor her were really clear – at the time of the shooting - what the disease is actually about, or if they did know, they embellished it to an extreme degree. The trickery is effective in a way – the viewer's reality is just as distorted as York's – but there's a surprising lack of energy to the picture, and the incessant figure swapping and countless interpretations/meanings (the cameras representing people, endlessly repeating imagery being mentally disruptive, fear of aging) alienate rather than draw in.
