Film

Quartet

Name: Quartet
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 1981
Cast: Isabelle Adjani, Maggie Smith, Alan Bates, Anthony Higgins, Suzanne Flon

Other titles called Quartet: the 1948 film, the 2012 film.

Social drama

Isabelle Adjani plays a desperate woman drawn into the orbit of a wealthy, sexually adventurous couple in 1920s Paris. Directed by James Ivory, it's a chamber piece about desire, dependency, and the ways people use each other. Intimate and unsettling, it rewards close attention but won't comfort you.

TMDb rating

2.9

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Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala at their peak: exquisite production design, complex female desire, and the erotic charge beneath polite society. A masterclass in restraint.

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Dangerous Liaisons1988

Merciless portrait of seduction and manipulation among the French aristocracy. Glenn Close and John Malkovich as predators who know exactly what they're doing, with surgical precision.

But Cold as a knife. There's no one to root for, and the cruelty accumulates without catharsis.

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Another Ivory-Jhabvala collaboration: Anthony Hopkins as a butler who's repressed desire and regret into his bones. Achingly beautiful and quietly devastating.

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The wildcard

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Under Capricorn1949

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But Hitchcock's most baroque film—sometimes overwrought, and the pacing reflects 1949's patience, not ours. It looks occasionally artificial, which some find beautiful and others find stagy.

Brideshead Revisited1981

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Belle de Jour1967

Buñuel's masterpiece about a bourgeois wife who works in a brothel during the day. Surreal, erotic, funny, and deeply strange. A film that expands on second viewing.

But Its logic is dreamlike and sometimes opaque. You have to surrender to it rather than solve it.

The Conformist1971

Bertolucci's study of a man caught between fascism and desire, gorgeously composed in every frame. Politics, eroticism, and morality fused into visual perfection.

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Better Late Than Never2016

A taut British crime drama with an excellent ensemble cast investigating a mystery at a hotel. Character-driven, with real dramatic tension beneath the surface.

But It's a period piece that feels small and confined; if you need scope and action, it won't deliver.

The Fox1967

Keir Dullea and Sandy Dennis in an erotic triangle on an isolated farm. Provocative, strange, and genuinely unsettling. A rare film that earns its discomfort.

But The sexual dynamics are murky and disturbing by design. Some will find it exploitative rather than exploratory.

Last Year at Marienbad1961

Both films are about the unreliability of perspective in a relationship. Whose version of events is true? The film won't tell you.

Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's hypnotic puzzle about memory, identity, and seduction. Formally revolutionary, in black and white, shot like a philosophical argument made flesh. It rewards surrender.

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The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone1961

Like Quartet, it's about a woman with power dwindling, drawn into an arrangement where sex and money are indistinguishable. Both films make you complicit in watching her compromise herself.

Vivien Leigh as an aging actress in Rome, courted by a beautiful younger man employed to seduce her. Tennessee Williams adapted into gorgeous Technicolor. Predatory, sensual, and tragic without self-pity.

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