QUINTET

   Film (1979). Lion's Gate/20th Century-Fox. Dir Robert Altman, starring Paul Newman, Bibi Andersson, Vittorio Gassman, Fernando Rey, Brigitte Fossey, Nina Van Pallandt, David Langton. Screenplay Frank Barhydt, Altman, Patricia Resnick, from a story by Altman, Lionel Chetwynd, Resnick. 118 mins. Colour.

   This strange film, crucified on release, is perhaps better than the then-consensus suggested. Newman is the seal-hunter in an (apparently) post- HOLOCAUST frozen future, a new Ice Age, who with his pregnant wife joins a dying but still crowded city,where corpses are left in the snow for the dogs to eat, where nobody is born any more, and where anomie is held at bay only by obsessive playing of the game Quintet. This is played either on a board or in real life; in the latter case 5 people must be killed: only 1 will survive. Newman's wife (Fossey) is accidentally killed during a game attack (along with Earth's last foetus), and Newman vengefully joins the game, wins, killinghis new lover (Andersson) in the process, and vanishes back into the snow. The obvious reading is that of the still vigorous, romantic herodestroying a corrupt society. Another plausible reading is that the death-focused game is all the real life that is left, and that the hero's despising it is itself a sterile act of turning away: the hero as lost fool. The imagery is strong, the pace glacial and the theme overintellectualized; the deliberately international cast sounds most of the time very uncomfortable with English (though the very alienation that suggests is appropriate to the story). Q bores the watcher, yet lingers for years in the mind.

   PN