Quartet **** (1981, Alan Bates, Maggie Smith, Isabelle Adjani, Anthony Higgins, Pierre Clémenti, Suzanne Flon, Sheila Gish) – Classic Movie Review 3179

Director James Ivory’s meticulous, beautifully crafted 1981 Franco-British drama Quartet stars Alan Bates, Maggie Smith, Isabelle Adjani and Anthony Higgins, the classy quartet who lead a notable cast in capable displays of intense acting in this sleek and involving version of Jean Rhys’s autobiographical novel.

Set in the bohemian Paris of the 1920s, it is about a beautiful, poverty-stricken wife, Marya Zelli (Adjani), drifting into a bizarre ménage-à-trois with a weird English married couple H J and Lois Heidler (Bates, Smith), while her art dealer husband Stephan (Higgins) is in prison after he is convicted of theft. Marya is left penniless and, at Stephan’s urging, accepts the hospitality of the strange couple who let her live in their house.

Director Ivory, also co-writing with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, fillets the material into a cultivated, decorative, baroque entertainment, with plenty of decadent surface sheen in the Merchant-Ivory production by producers Ismail Merchant and Jean-Pierre Mahot. It a very good-looking film thanks to Pierre Lhomme’s cinematography and Jean-Jacques Caziot’s production designs, and Richard Robbins’s attractive score is another asset.

Also in the cast are Pierre Clémenti as Théo the pornographer, Suzanne Flon as Mme. Hautchamp, Sheila Gish, Daniel Chatto, Daniel Mesguich, Paulita Sedgwick, Virginie Thévenet, Bernice Stegers, Wiley Wood, Annie Noél, Maurice Ribot.

Curiously, Maggie Smith starred in another, unrelated film called Quartet in 2012. This made her the first star to make two unrelated films with the same title since Joan Crawford with Possessed (1931) and Possessed (1947).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3179

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