If people are different depending on who they're with, than each person may be many people over a lifetime. The strange anxiety of encountering a past lover, then, is even stranger when that lover is dead, as in Robert Altman's 1972 film Images. Featuring an incredible performance from Susannah York, this disorienting, scary, and beautiful film is melancholy, wicked, and captivating.
A children's book author called Cathryn (York) holidays at a cottage in beautiful Irish countryside with her husband, Hugh (Rene Auberjonois). She's experiencing extreme anxiety that is either manifesting as or caused by (or both) phone calls she apparently receives from herself and by her husband suddenly transforming into her dead lover, Rene (Marcel Bozzulfi).
There are many wonderfully eerie shots of Cathryn seeing herself across a distance--a tiny figure on a hill or picking her way over stones across a turbulent stream. Another former lover starts to appear and plague her. She starts to figure out they're not real and so using a shotgun or a kitchen knife on either one doesn't seem so dangerous. Of course, we as the audience do not share her confidence--she seems saner when she's terrified.
Altman cited Ingmar Bergman's Persona as an influence and that's certainly apparent. But I was reminded more of another Ingmar Bergman movie, Hour of the Wolf, for the presence of the supernatural and the protagonist's identity as an artist. There's a bit of The Magician in it, too. The music by John Williams and Stomu Yamashita is also reminiscent of Bergman's films. It's one of those times when I find myself reflecting on just how astonishingly influential Bergman is but Images is a great film in its own right.
Images is available on The Criterion Channel.
Twitter Sonnet #1409
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