I have a lot of trouble with films featuring unreliable narrators. While I understand that films about a character with a frayed sense of reality need to be as chaotic and fractured as their psyche, they tend to alienate me emotionally. Robert Altman's "Images" does those things, of course, but what makes this a step
above similarly themed films like, "Persona," "Black Swan" or "The Double Life of Veronique," is that it's rather subtle. Films featuring a character confronting their double are usually fraught with ham-fisted symbolism and overly obvious motifs. I'm not saying "Images" is without these things but Altman has the finesse to blend them, more or less, seamlessly into the film. With the help of fluid cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, a dynamic and precise Susannah York and a haunting score by John Williams, "Images" is able to transcend the normal pitfalls of this microcosm of a genre and remain a serious piece of artistic expression.
April 29, 2011
