Images (1972)

IMAGES  (1972)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Altman
    Susannah York, Rene Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi,
    Hugh Millais, Cathryn Harrison, John Morley
In a movie that foreshadows both Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" and Altman's "3 Women", Susannah York plays an emotionally unstable fantasy writer who escapes with her husband to a vacation house in the country, where she really cracks up, haunted by a dead ex-lover and a doppelgänger of herself. There are no transitional effects to let you know what's real and what's imagined in this. To a person going crazy, it all looks real, so that's what you see. It's a movie for Altman fans mostly, a throwback to a time - the 1970s - when an independent filmmaker with an idea and a bag of good weed could not only dream up something this unusual, but imagine getting away with it. York won the best actress award at Cannes for her performance, and that's her unicorn story she's reading in the voiceover on the soundtrack.