Critics reviews

Whether the arc of Marya’s fate feels overly engineered to you or not, “Quartet” retains its power to unsettle in its accumulation of cuts and bruises, the rare Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala effort that mines a glamorized past not for nuanced dignity but for a kind of elegant, honest sordidness.

[Quartet] is a visually dazzling recreation of 1920s Paris that subverts romanticized notions of the era, exposing the City of Light’s seedy underbelly and the forms of bondage women endure in a hedonistic but still rigidly patriarchal society.

A rather licentious and anomalous pre-WWII expat narrative, which is reminiscent of the gothic side of the Brontë sisters and W. Somerset Maugham, [Quartet is] more of a period exercise than a successful character study... Uniformly compelling performances (particularly an agonizing Maggie Smith) makes this ripe for rediscovery.

[Quartet] is a typically classy piece of film-making from director James Ivory... It was sadly not as successful or lauded as Ivory's later EM Forster adaptations, A Room with a View and Howards End, but it's worth a look nevertheless.

Maggie Smith and Alan Bates successfully personify the cold spirit that Rhys held to be pre-war England, but Adjani manages merely to reduce Marya's fatalism to spinelessness. The direction, intimate yet retaining a sense of distance, is true both to Rhys and to Ivory.

Ivory’s interest is focused so completely on the period clothes and decor that the drama never surfaces; he is a resourceful designer but no director.

[Quartet] fails to heat up sufficiently despite a literary source that seethes with racy, caustic, turbulent undercurrents... [The film] emerges as an interesting disappointment, reflecting a cultivated and audacious taste in material inhibited by a stuffy approach to filmmaking. The advantage of [Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's] intelligent, literate, methodical style is that it may accommodate novel themes and impressive performances.

The movie can never go into Marya's mind. We see only what she is doing, and what she is doing seems less mysterious and poignant than foolish. As a result, the movie has no satisfactory center... ''Quartet'' is handsome but, ultimately, weightless.

James Ivory takes his usual aloofly observant distance and the film’s love triangle loses some drastic impetus. The seething Paris bohemian backdrop of the era is used only in a token way... Overall, a lowkey film.