Images

A few weeks prior to watching Images, I saw Die My Love. It was, for me, an abject failure, portraying the downward spiral of a woman caught in the deepest throes of post-partum depression with both insulting hyperbole and clinical detachment. It is a movie incapable of generating sympathy for its lead character, as it was not designed to do so. Images is that movie all over again, but with one crucial difference: Die My Love, for all the fault I found with it, at least tied a trigger to its main character's descent into madness. Images can't even muster the energy to conquer that pitiful first hurdle. Its lead, Cathryn (played by Susannah York), just starts losing it, within the first five minutes or so, hallucinating voices interjecting into phone calls. And when I say "just starts", I mean it in every "somehow, Palpatine returned", don't-ask-questions-it's-just-happening kind of way. The movie doesn't give us a glimpse into the mind of Cathryn pre-insanity, other than to know she had a few lovers prior to (and possibly during?, it's confusing) her marriage. We're dropped into her freaking out over some phone calls, she begs to go on a vacation, and the madness only grows from there. I will give Robert Altman credit for the direction and editing here, as he uses the structure of the movie to illustrate how unhinged Cathryn is getting in some creative ways. But it also reaches a point of diminishing returns, as he employs the technique so often and to such extremes, the entire movie can be questioned. And at that point, what's even the point of the movie? You've not kept me on the edge of my seat, you have me wondering if anything I saw happened at all, and that's pretty much an artsy way of pulling off the "this was all a dream" ending. So while Altman successfully pulls off making the movie a hypnotic, surreal waking nightmare, it's to the detriment of the movie being able to tell its own story. And when you couple that with the movie not giving the audience any way of knowing Cathryn before, and taking a stand-offish, arm's length approach to emotional resonance, it leaves the movie feeling like a technical exercise instead of a character study. I do dislike it less than Die My Love, if only because Die My Love's attitude toward PPD was insulting, and Images doesn't have that. And, on a pure technical aspect, Images feels like exactly what Altman intended it to be. It does keep the viewer as off-kilter as its lead. And Susannah York does a good job. But it's not enough to call the movie a success. I kept waiting for everything to tie together, for some big reveal to make it make sense from the outside, and nothing like that ever happened. Images doesn't feel like a movie; it feels like someone explaining to you the dream they had last night. And we all know how tedious it is to listen to someone's dream explanation.