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Quartet More at IMDbPro »

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9 reviews in total

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24 out of 25 people found the following review useful:
A complex film, the harsh fate of a young woman without resources in the twenties..., 20 August 2000

Author: Peegee-3 (poetsrx@webtv.net) from Santa Monica, CA

In the tradition of some Merchant/Ivory films...this one deals with very profound social realities for a young woman (Isabelle Adjani)in Paris in the 1920s whose husband is a thief, is jailed. She is left penniless and without means of support (has no working papers). A rather strange English couple (Maggie Smith and Alan Bates) offer her refuge...but at the price of seduction by the husband, tolerated by the artist wife, who is inordinately tied to him emotionally. The young woman's emotional and psychological state is thrown into almost unbearable ambivalance...Love for her husband whom she visits weekly in jail and the need for survival. The film's visual beauty, the lighting, the intensity of color, the evocation of the "jazz age", the cabarets, the authentic costuming, in addition to the splended acting and direction make this a film deserving of far more attention than it's received, in my opinion. A truly cinematic experience of significance.

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14 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
Bleaker than the real-life version., 4 November 2001

Author: Dierdre99

Abandoned in Paris with no work permit and no savings, when her art-dealing (illegal) Polish husband is sent to prison, Marya Zelli (Isabelle Adjani) accepts the hospitality of the Heidlers, Lois and H.J.(as Lois invariably calls him) which, probably inevitably, involves her providing bed service to H.J. The video box describes the Heidlers as a "freethinking British couple" - if you can accept a couple, with such limited self-awareness and inability to talk through their problems, as freethinkers.

The film is based on the novel by Jean Rhys, based on her own experiences with Ford Madox Ford who presumably had more going for him than H.J., or else he wouldn't be in all those books on the literature of the twenties. Apparently Ford helped Rhys with her novel, and after he tired of her body got her a ghost-writing job on the Riviera. Rhys' husband was out of prison and had abandoned her before she moved in with the Fords. Presumably her major motivation was her devotion to her writing. Marya Zelli, in the film is not a writer, and she stays in Paris because her husband is still in prison. She says more than once to Lois that if given 100 Fr she would disappear (back to England where she could legally work?) but she gets 250 Fr just before moving in with the Heidlers when she sells almost everything she has to the hotel concierge.

Thus while the film is of the desperation of no choice, Marya has in fact fewer options than the real-life Rhys, and the film ending where Marya is thrown on the mercy of her husband's acquaintance from prison, is very bleak, unlike Rhys' fate of being ejected to a writing job.

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10 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
Astonishing sense of place, time and trouble., 4 March 2003

Author: Evan Wm. Cameron from Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Few screenwriters have ever jumped the gap that Jhabvala traversed between THE EUROPEANS (1979) and QUARTET (1981). I know of no other film that captures as well the sense of European pre-WW2 'decadence' (compare CABARET for an object lesson in failure!), or that is directed and photographed with stronger integration of the settings, colours, sounds and behavior within the story being told. A remarkable achievement - the film that put filmmakers on notice about how well the remarkable Jhabvala/Ivory/Merchant trio present stories locked into their space and time.

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10 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
A brilliant film of desperate sadness (Woolcott) and naivete in a French setting, 12 May 2001

Author: cestmoi from United States

That this was seen on a first visit to Paris at the Pathe Hautefeuille in the 6th may color the memory, but there it is. The sad Woolcott figure played by Bates is desperate (as is his Maggie Smith [BRILLIANT!] wife, a sad and cynical lady) and has an eye for new flesh. (This is pure Noel Harrison (Rex's boy) "new flesh to carve," as in his Young Girl cut.) The Woolcottioan figure is paunchy, unattractive, hungry, but with some social clout, and skincrawling. Maggie's character aids and abets. What's her line? One wonders if the satyr is in fact impotent. Cinematography, music, story line, cast...over reasonable expectations. Desperate story from a sad and deserate writer, Rhys, a suicide, I seem to recall. Ivory did this? Harder than the usual soft stuff the boyos do. Wondeful. Buy it.

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10 out of 18 people found the following review useful:
A serious disappointment, 20 February 2003

Author: William Ploch (wbploc0@pop.uky.edu) from Lexington, Kentucky

It's hard to say exactly why "Quartet" fails. There are certainly some good things to be said; Maggie Smith gives her character just the right mix of not-too-subtle cynicism and self-loathing, and the photography by Pierre Lhomme does a fine job of complementing the surroundings. But there is something missing. The Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala trio have always invested their stories with a strong compassion for their characters, lending a quiet urgency to the tone. Yet there is little of that feeling here.

The desperation of Isabelle Adjani's Marya simply does not ring clear, perhaps because her emotions are kept at a distance from the viewer when they should be brought to the forefront of the story. Marya views Heidler (Alan Bates) as a dominating force, but her fears and his intimidation never develop into anything effective. Bates is an actor who can always be depended on to provide a good performance, but his character is not given enough weight to dominate the screen when he should. In films such as `Howards End' and `The Remains of the Day,' the emotional conflicts between the characters drive the story and keep the (attentive) viewer involved; here, the conflicts do not spurn enough interest because the motivations of those involved are not very clear. The overall effect of "Quartet" is very cold and somber, with few, if any, memorable results.

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2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Too literal a translation, perhaps?, 7 November 2010

Author: parsifalssister from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

It was not an easy film to watch, but watch it, I did. I did because I read Rhys in the 60s, and the book that drove this film among them. It does follow that story, but perhaps as other reviewers noted translating the novel to the screen was too much, too soon, or too literal.

Smith carries the film, while Bates and Adjani appear overly dramatic and disconnected as lovers.

The desperation of Marya (Adjani) is somewhat trivialized, while the Paris in which the story unfolds is nearly glorified but presented exactly how I image it in the 20s & 30s. Marya, while not literally Jean Rhys herself, is a reasonable facsimile and her doomed relationship with her first husband, and Ford Madox Ford became the basis of Quartet. In thinking about how the story plays out I remember how vulnerable and lost the author was and how much of herself she stuffed into her writing. But in that writing was a subtlety that did not translate onto the screen.

I gave it perhaps too high a vote, but it gets this 7 for its Ivory-Merchant treatment of painterly beauty which I always admire.

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1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
one thumb down, 7 September 2011
Author: Massimiliano Misturelli from Italy

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I was looking forward to see this movie. Finally I did and I was really disappointed. I'm positive about one thing: the script was weak and superficial. Ruth Prawer did not a good job this time. In an interview Ivory said that she was not fond of the idea of making a movie from that novel. Well, Ivory did convince her, but he was completely wrong. She botched the job, that's sure. Bates and Smith do a very good job, I'm not sure Adjani does. Anyway, I don't like to say these things about a movie director I admire so much, but truth before everything. I shall wipe my tears away watching Maurice and The remains of the day, truly the best of his movies.

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1 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
An autobiographical story, 23 August 2003
Author: djpass from Prospect, Nova Scotia

Jean Rhys wrote this novel about her relationship with the then prominent writer Ford Madox Ford. While a young woman's husband is in prison, she is taken in by a writer and his wife, becoming the man's mistress. It was not a happy affair, but at least Rhys got her revenge with this story.

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3 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Not a Quartet, simply a Maggie Smith solo..., 30 August 2008

Author: Andy (film-critic) from Bookseller of the Blue Ridge

"Quartet" was nothing more than just "Sad Café" with Redgrave replaced by Maggie Smith. Sure, the stories are different, but Smith carried this film – throughout the hour and forty minutes, I watched just her, apathetic towards anyone else. The music was dull, the scenery was again beautiful but teetered on repetitious, and our story was non-existent. Cheating socialites … art thieves … wives attempting to keep control … the elements were all in place, but M&I could not carry the raw emotion to this film. "Quartet", simply put, was downgraded to a miserable solo.

Merchant & Ivory did a great job in showing us Paris, 1920, both physically and emotionally. Having watched other films trying to capture the feel and vision of this era, they went above and beyond by handing us scenes in apartments, lounges, and those eccentric party scenes. The detail towards both the locations and the costumes were amazing, especially for Maggie Smith who seemed perfect in her imagined time and place. There was even this great scene that demonstrated the sexual consensus during this era. As this is a film about the honesty of love, it fit well into the dual-emotions being felt by both Smith and Adjani (the woman who moves into Smith and Bates' relationship). Ivory, directing this film, has done a phenomenal job of building the imagery, such as the places, events, and material feel for "Quartet", and he even does a great job in giving us the symbolism of the characters. Smith, playing the dedicated wife to her husband, HJ (played by Alan Bates), is eerily similar to the youthful Adjani - seemingly unable to say no to the forceful advances of Bates. Ivory gives us this rare glimpse to see what a youthful Smith may have been experiencing when she first met Bates, and why she allows this destructive ménage a trios. Coupled with the other sexual parodies throughout, Ivory has captured his desired emotions, but where "Quartet" fails is that he doesn't know what to do with them.

So, our scenes are set up beautifully. The underlining meaning behind our characters is also in place (giving graduate students something to talk about), but exactly does this film fail. "Quartet" never reaches the level of "Sad Café" because outside of Maggie Smith, none of our characters are worth their price. A maniacal combination of over-the-top acting and horrid editing, one would nearly need to watch "Quartet" four times before fully seeing the central characters come to life. This was a difficult film to follow, because our leads were impossible to stand behind, and our story seemed rushed and never quite developed. Sure, we had great visuals to accompany them, but it wasn't enough. I never thought I knew the pressures of Adjani throughout the entire film – the anger of Bates seemed to come from left field (not enough development), and Adjani's husband could have been a cardboard cut-out and still be able to get the job done. Due to the sub-par acting, Maggie Smith was able to chomp down hard and demonstrate a full range of abilities. "Quartet" is worth watching merely for Smith, but the rest will leave you bored. It fails because Ivory has created a film with the minority in mind.

This is not a film for everyone, and having seen several slow-moving British films, it wasn't even right for me. Ivory seems to be lacking a universal message, something that one could escape from the film with. Something that, in a group of friends, one could say "But I did like this part because…" For "Quartet" it wasn't there. Perhaps it was the translation from Jean Rhys' novel. Not everything can be translated from the printed page, and where you could read a scene as less subtle, Ivory went hysterical. There were just these moments, especially near the end, where instead of coming to a conclusion, Ivory instituted anger, rage, and screaming. It just didn't work. It didn't fit these under-developed characters. My major issue with this film is that events took place that didn't fit our actors. We were subjugated to watch them do things in this film that I do not believe they would actually do – our character's actions seemed to negate their voice.

Overall, "Quartet" stimulated my visual senses, demonstrated the power of Maggie Smith, and slipped some symbolic messages deep within the sub-text of the film, but on every other level it failed. Again, Smith proved that even playing a secondary character, she could take the role, give us those emotion-filled eyes, and steal away every scene possible. Even when she wasn't on screen, we couldn't help but wonder what she was doing. Ivory, as director, cannot seem to control the story. His failure comes with the horrid translation of Rhys' work. They chose to replace emotion with rage, which transformed the story's irony of love into confusing connections. Paris, 1920s, was beautiful. He hit his stride very well with our location, but the rest of the film flopped like a suffocating fish. "Quartet" is a very dry film – due mainly in part to our disastrous actors unable to life and the doldrums the repeating score. It had quite a bit of potential, but never quite fulfilled any promises. Merchant & Ivory created a film that some will love, but missed their opportunity to appeal to greater masses. Not that this film had to be a blockbuster, by strengthening the characters as well as the story, Ivory could have had another solid cinematic experience. Instead, it fumbled – causing the viewers to be the ones that suffered the most.

Grade: ** ½ out of *****

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