Dis­cov­er the frag­ment­ed hor­rors of this Robert Alt­man psychodrama

“In Search of Uni­corns – a book for chil­dren,” intones author Cathryn (Susan­nah York) in voiceover at the begin­ning of Robert Altman’s Images (the title appear­ing in mod­est low­er case), before nar­rat­ing the events of the lat­est fic­tion that she is still com­pos­ing. Accom­pa­ny­ing her voice we see images of Cathryn her­self, writ­ing alone in her well-appoint­ed home – images that have been shot (by DoP Vil­mos Zsig­mond) at var­i­ous cant­ed angles to dis­tort and dis­rupt our impres­sion of her.

John Williams’ high­ly dis­cor­dant score only adds to the ner­vous ten­sion between sight and sound. The hero­ine of Cathryn’s sto­ry is called Una, a name sug­ges­tive of fem­i­nine uni­ty, but Cathryn her­self already seems frag­ment­ed – split some­where between the fan­ta­sy of her words and the real­i­ty of her setting.

We hear not just Cathryn’s voice, but anoth­er female voice call­ing her name in a whis­per, and the sound of the tele­phone inter­rupt­ing her cre­ative process. ​“You sound dif­fer­ent, are you alright?”, says her friend Joan on the oth­er end of the line, ​“You didn’t sound like your­self” – even as we see both Cathryn and her reflec­tion in a mir­ror. Soon that oth­er female voice has come on the line, mock­ing and laugh­ing at Cathryn and sug­gest­ing that her hus­band Hugh (Rene Auber­jonois) is not, as he claims, at a busi­ness din­ner, but in a hotel bed with anoth­er woman.

When Hugh does final­ly return home, to his con­fused query­ing of why Cathryn has left all four phones off the hook, she responds, with a cer­tain ambi­gu­i­ty: ​“Isn’t that what peo­ple do when they don’t want to be dis­turbed?” It is clear, even at this ear­ly point in the film, that Cathryn is a bun­dle of anx­i­eties and dis­so­ci­a­tions – and in case any­one has missed that she is prone to hal­lu­ci­na­tions and fugues, a French-speak­ing man sud­den­ly appears in her bed­room, ter­ri­fy­ing Cathryn while going entire­ly unno­ticed by Hugh. This is Rene (Mar­cel Boz­zuf­fi), Cathryn’s ex lover, and giv­en that he died in a plane crash three years ear­li­er, he can­not real­ly be there, except in Cathryn’s head.

On a vis­it with Hugh to Green Cove, her rur­al child­hood home, Cathyrn is con­front­ed not just again with the very tan­gi­ble revenant Rene, but with oth­er reflec­tions and fig­ures from her past: anoth­er, very much liv­ing ex-lover, Mar­cel (Hugh Mil­lais), who keeps drop­ping in for vis­its, a phan­tom dog, and even her own dop­pel­gänger. Marcel’s teenaged daugh­ter Susan­nah (Cathryn Har­ri­son) is, in both her phys­i­cal appear­ance and her lone­ly regres­sion into imag­i­na­tive spaces, anoth­er dou­ble for Cathryn.

The fact that either female char­ac­ter has the fore­name of the actress play­ing the oth­er, and that, in scenes where they both share the frame, at least one of them is often seen in a mir­ror, clinch­es the inter­change­abil­i­ty of their iden­ti­ty. Susan­nah is both the daugh­ter that child­less Cathryn might have had, and a real friend to off­set all the imag­i­nary ones. Or per­haps she is just anoth­er imag­i­nary friend, and a ghost­ly embod­i­ment of Cathryn’s own ado­les­cence at Green Cove.

Cathryn is haunt­ed not just by Rene and oth­er ghosts from her past, but also by the influ­ence of Roman Polanski’s Repul­sion. Yet Images is not only a por­trait of a woman’s men­tal break­down (like Altman’s ear­li­er That Cold Day in the Park), but also a schiz­o­phrenic study of the cre­ative process itself, with each piece of the nar­ra­tive puz­zle (in a film that promi­nent­ly fea­tures a jig­saw puz­zle) reveal­ing not just Cathryn’s atom­ised mind­set, but also the piece­meal work­ings of her (and per­haps also Altman’s) autho­r­i­al imagination.

Cathryn may con­stant­ly con­fuse her fan­tasies with her real­i­ties, and in par­tic­u­lar con­found the per­son­ae of Hugh, Rene and Mar­cel, but she remains, unlike Cather­ine Deneuve’s Car­ol in Repul­sion, all too aware of her own con­fu­sion, and even adopts strate­gies, how­ev­er vain, to elim­i­nate her delu­sions for­ev­er from her mind.

All this is realised entire­ly through the dis­con­ti­nu­ities of Graeme Clifford’s dis­ori­ent­ing edit­ing, as one actor is switched for anoth­er with­in a giv­en scene, and Cathryn even con­ducts cut­away con­ver­sa­tions with her­self. It is a solip­sis­tic approach to char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, as Cathryn’s skewed per­spec­tive is the only fixed point in a world where iden­ti­ty is oth­er­wise flu­id. With Cathryn becom­ing increas­ing­ly aggres­sive towards her var­i­ous vis­i­tors, events grow ever more tense, as we are unsure whether we are wit­ness­ing our decid­ed­ly un-uni­fied, semi-frigid heroine’s mere­ly repressed fan­tasies, or gen­uine enact­ments, of sex and violence.

Or whether per­haps we are just see­ing all the frag­ments of Cathryn’s lat­est children’s fic­tion (which she peri­od­i­cal­ly works on and nar­rates in voiceover) com­ing togeth­er in (psycho)dramatic form, like in the Coen broth­ers’ Bar­ton Fink or François Ozon’s Swim­ming Pool. The final scenes of Images might appear to put the last pieces in the puz­zle, but in fact, upon reflec­tion, serve only to mud­dy fur­ther the ambigu­ous like­ness of Cathryn that the film has been paint­ing. After all, if you go in search of uni­corns, you may end up find­ing para­dox­i­cal creatures.

Although York won the Best Actress award at the 25^th Cannes Film Fes­ti­val for her (dual) per­for­mance as Cathryn, Images had only a min­i­mal run in the US and suf­fered from near non-exis­tent pro­mo­tion in the UK. Unnerv­ing and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly nuanced, it is ripe for rediscovery.

Images is released by Arrow on Blu-ray in a brand new 4K restora­tion from the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive on 19 March.