四重奏

　　It has been said that most great twentieth century novels include scenes in a hotel, a symptom of the vast uprooting that has occurred in the last century: James Ivory begins Quartet with a montage of the hotels of Montparnasse, a quiet prelude before our introduction to the violently lost souls who inhabit them.
　　Adapted from the 1928 autobiographical novel by Jean Rhys, Quartet is the story of a love quadrangle between a complicated young West Indian woman named Marya (played by Isabelle Adjani), her husband Stefan (Anthony Higgins), a manipulative English art patron named Heidler (Alan Bates), and his painter wife Lois (Maggie Smith). The film is set in the Golden Age of Paris, Hemingway&#39s &quotmoveable feast&quot of cafe culture and extravagant nightlife, glitter and literati: yet underneath is the outline of something sinister beneath the polished brasses and brasseries.
　　When Marya&#39s husband is put in a Paris prison on charges of selling stolen art works, she is left indigent and is taken in by Heidler and his wife: the predatory Englishman (whose character Rhys bases on the novelist Ford Madox Ford) is quick to take advantage of the new living arrangement, and Marya finds herself in a stranglehold between husband and wife. Lovers alternately gravitate toward and are repelled by each other, now professing their love, now confessing their brutal indifference -- all the while keeping up appearances. The film explores the vast territory between the &quotnice&quot and the &quotgood,&quot between outward refinement and inner darkness: after one violent episode, Lois asks Marya not to speak of it to the Paris crowd. &quotIs that all you&#39re worried about?&quot demands an outraged Marya. &quotYes,&quot Lois replies with icy candor, &quotas a matter of fact.&quot
　　Adjani won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her performances in Quartet: her Marya is a volatile compound of French schoolgirl and scorned mistress, veering between tremulous joy and hysterical outburst. Smith shines in one of her most memorable roles: she imbues Lois with a Katherine-of-Aragon impotent rage, as humiliated as she is powerless in the face of her husband&#39s choices. Her interactions with Bates are scenes from a marriage that has moved from disillusionment to pale acceptance.
　　Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and James Ivory&#39s screenplay uses Rhys&#39s novel as a foundation from which it constructs a world that is both true to the novel and distinctive in its own right, painting a society that has lost its inhibitions and inadvertently lost its soul. We are taken to mirrored cafes, then move through the looking glass: Marya, in one scene, is offered a job as a model and then finds herself in a sadomasochistic pornographer&#39s studio. The film, as photographed by Pierre Lhomme, creates thoroughly cinematic moments that Rhy&#39s novel could not have attempted: in one of the Ivory&#39s most memorable scenes, a black American chanteuse (extraordinarily played by Armelia McQueen) entertains Parisian patrons with a big and brassy jazz song, neither subtle nor elegant. Ivory keeps the camera on the singer&#39s act: there is something in her unguarded smile that makes the danger beneath Montparnasse manners seem more acute.