Excellent, a Must See

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Someone has to say it: the emperor is wearing no clothes. Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of Robert Altman, who directed at least dozen films I greatly admire, including two of my all-time favorites. To me, the willingness to take artistic risks, fall on one's face, then get up and try again, is a sign of creative courage and is to be respected. But this doesn't mean we have to applaud the failures. Maybe it seemed like a good idea on paper: let's represent the cruelty, absurdity and meaninglessness of life with an isolated, post-apocalyptic group of people who addictively play a board game (never described, but apparently requiring no skill) while awaiting their inevitable deaths. As a concept, this might seem attractive, envisioned as a science fiction epic that combined the best of Kubrick and Bergman. The resulting movie, however, is quite simply a disaster. "Quintet" is talky, jejune, visually static, humorless, repetitive, emotionally distant, without suspense, confusing, and most conspicuously, boring. It must be one of the least engrossing movies I've ever watched. Even with a distinguished international cast, there isn't one character with any depth—which means no character to give a flying "f" about (and this from a director who in other films brought dozens of characters to life with minimal dialogue and limited screen time). The dreamy, grease-limned cinematography is more annoying than evocative. The existential sophistication is that of a 12-year-old who just figured out we're all going to die—or maybe Altman had one of those moments when he was high on drugs and thought the insight he'd just had was profound, but forgot to sleep it off. "We didn't ask to be here." (Whoa! Deep, man.) I concede there are a couple of visually striking images amid the endless shots of people in big coats walking to their next scenes (though oddly, they don't ever look cold), and the music is interesting, if a bit overwrought given the banality of the events being portrayed. Neither virtue is enough for me to elevate this film to a "2" rating. Honestly, people, there have to be 20 better Altman movies you should watch before you try to suffer through this one. I can only hope one day a secret diary is found that shows Altman was punking us to win a bet that he could get some people to watch anything.

Altman's most underrated work, Quintet's dreamy other worldly aesthetics are as mesmerising in their bleak detached white wash, as 2001: A Space Odesseys lush elegant space scape's were, only Altman's vision is one of despondence without respite, and it's that which alienates some from enjoying this slow, often perplexing near masterpiece. Well overdue a new critical appraisal with regards it's standing amongst Altman's other more celebrated films. Despite the widely held view its one of Robert Altmans lesser achievements, Quintet still enjoys a comparatively small but loyal cult following that will hopefully grow in time.

Quintet is a post-decline film, I use the word decline rather than (post nuclear) apocalypse as something quite a lot more gradual seems to have happened. It's not implicitly suggested that this film happens on earth, or suggested otherwise. We have a snowbound pentagonal city, and we have a seal hunter Essex (played by Paul Newman) approaching the city from the infinite snowscape of the South. We have an almost bizarre quality of cast including Bunuel favourite Fernando Rey and Bergman regular Bibi Andersson. And we have a deadly game, Quintet. The game it seems is played both on a board and occasionally in the flesh so-to-speak (imagine if people tried to act out chess). Robert Altman even invented a real game of Quintet for the film, and apparently people still play it. It's clear that the game is vicious from the start, when we see a player manipulate pieces so as to arrange the "killing order"; also that there is a philosophy behind the game, individuals covet their pieces which are often high craft, and passed down as heirlooms (Altman had people finding curios in antique shops for this). The central driver of the plot is that Essex witnesses a murder and spends the whole movie trying to find why it happens and what it all means.I would call the set for the film one of the "great movie sets". It's shot on the dilapidated remains of the Expo 67, or the Montreal World Fair from 1967, which was based on some partly man made islands in the Saint-Lawrence River. Expo 67 was a fairly enormous matter of Canadian pride back then, the housing development built to coincide with it "Habitat 67" is stunning (pictures can be got from google quite easily).It is an example of the great genius of Robert Altman that instead of control freaking a script he went to Montreal and let the script fit itself around the deserted bewintered pavilions. One of the players, called Saint Christopher runs a mission for the feeble where he preaches all sorts of skewed dissonant religion. Behind him whilst he orates, we see a banner, clearly a relic from the Expo, "The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle". This is a quote from Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky, the father of Russian space exploration, and written in 1911, perhaps decorating some sort of planetarium originally. In the religious context relating to the afterlife in which Altman places it, it becomes phantasmagorical and bewitching (as does a photo collage in the main quintet hall). This is a true example of film aleatoricism, the film was already green-lighted before Altman had been anywhere near the Expo, originally the idea was to shoot in Chicago.Another thing Altman makes an asset out of are his clearly wizened and ageing cast, it lends gravitas because the world of Quintet is one where no-one has been born in at least a generation, it's just something else that he made fit. One common complaint of the film is that the cast didn't have very good English. That is undoubtedly true, however I wasn't having very much problem with it myself. It goes to emphasise the estrangement of all the characters, it's right that they find communication difficult, one character smiles on hearing Essex use the word friend because he hasn't heard that word in a long time.This film is very philosophical about the nature of existence and the directions we should take, however let me give you the big health warning that you will only get out of it what you yourself put in, hence the current 4.6/10 rating on the IMDb, it is not a film for the idling. One thing I also liked about it by way of image is that it was very much like a silent film. Altman in a great many of the shots has had Vaseline smeared around the edges of the camera to create that kind of cosy centring effect that you see in early silent films, ie. the oneiric lack or periphery. He's also enjoying the shooting of nature. It reminds me a bit of Sir Arne's Treasure (1919 - Mauritz Stiller), where a lot of the focus is simply on shooting nature, and also of the frozen alpine scenes you get in German bergfilms.At the moment this film is available on R1 DVD via a four-disc box-set of Altman films. One extra bonus point for the set is it has a Quintet documentary with chat from RA himself. As regards what people have said of the Cold War, I didn't hear Altman mention it once, it's a film that works just as well now. Surely there were Cold War parallels, but in fact the film is utterly timeless.I want to give you a further health warning that for those of you who are looking for a lot of plot and in depth characterisation, you will find in this film two hours of monotony, and it will also depress you. For me it's true genius.

Not at all a disaster that critics consider it to be. The film isn't perfect, nor is it excellent, but it is interesting. Altman does manage to create a vision of a future with a mood and feel all its own; it's fairly original. It doesn't have quite the bleakness of a futuristic (though, of course, entirely different) film such as "1984", but it's certainly no "Star Trek" - no mindless optimism about the future here. On the bleakness level it's something like "THX 1138", which is quite bleak. The music is good and typical of many Altman films (like "3 Women", "Images", or "Vincent & Theo" – his best movies, interestingly enough). The improvement could have been done mainly on the ending, which is a little too pointless. Why does Newman leave the city only at the end of the film? Why didn't he leave earlier, since he was both in danger - even though he maybe wasn't entirely convinced of that all the time - and since there was nothing for him to do there? Was he resisting leaving the city because he ran out of seals in the outside world? Doesn't seem to be much of an explanation. Or did he wait until the game was over so he'd collect a prize, which he thought he'd get? Also not a reasonable enough explanation.