Quartet

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. Read full review

Almost always entertaining to watch and infuriatingly wrong in several important ways, chief among these being the casting of Miss Adjani as Marya. Read full review

Their best work since the fresh and appealing studies in cultural clash they made in India in the '60s, such as "Shakespeare Wallah." Movies are not literature, and Ivory is a dangerously literary director. But in Quartet he has found the images to express Jean Rhys's troubling vision of female fatality. [9 Nov 1981, p.94]