Quartet

An adaptation of Jean Rhys' semi-autobiographical novel (for another angle on the affair, see Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier), in which a victim of circumstances, stranded in the Paris of the '20s when her con-man husband is jailed, becomes subject to the predatory help of a hedonistic upper class English couple. 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.