量子资源网提供本资源 <> It has been said that most great twentieth century novels include scenes in a hotel, a symtom of the vast urooting that has occurred in the last century: James Ivory begins Quartet with a montage of the hotels of Montarnasse, a quiet relude before our introduction to the violently lost souls who inhabit them. Adated from the 1928 autobiograhical novel by Jean Rhys, Quartet is the story of a love quadrangle between a comlicated young West Indian woman named Marya (layed by Isabelle Adjani), her husband Stefan (Anthony Higgins), a maniulative English art atron named Heidler (Alan Bates), and his ainter wife Lois (Maggie Smith). The film is set in the Golden Age of Paris, Hemingway's "moveable feast" of cafe culture and extravagant nightlife, glitter and literati: yet underneath is the outline of something sinister beneath the olished brasses and brasseries. When Marya's husband is ut in a Paris rison on charges of selling stolen art works, she is left indigent and is taken in by Heidler and his wife: the redatory 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 reelled by each other, now rofessing their love, now confessing their brutal indifference -- all the while keeing u aearances. The film exlores the vast territory between the "nice" and the "good," between outward refinement and inner darkness: after one violent eisode, Lois asks Marya not to seak of it to the Paris crowd. "Is that all you're worried about?" demands an outraged Marya. "Yes," Lois relies with icy candor, "as a matter of fact." Adjani won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her erformances in Quartet: her Marya is a volatile comound 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 imotent rage, as humiliated as she is owerless in the face of her husband's choices. Her interactions with Bates are scenes from a marriage that has moved from disillusionment to ale accetance. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and James Ivory's screenlay uses Rhys's novel as a foundation from which it constructs a world that is both true to the novel and distinctive in its own right, ainting 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 ornograher's studio. The film, as hotograhed by Pierre Lhomme, creates thoroughly cinematic moments that Rhy's novel could not have attemted: in one of the Ivory's most memorable scenes, a black American chanteuse (extraordinarily layed by Armelia McQueen) entertains Parisian atrons with a big and brassy jazz song, neither subtle nor elegant. Ivory kees the camera on the singer's act: there is something in her unguarded smile that makes the danger beneath Montarnasse manners seem more acute.
