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Must See Movie...

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

In a post-apocalyptic future, in which the Earth is blanketed by snow, two travellers journey to a distant city. Once there, they discover the last remnants of humanity living a primitive existence within the battered remains of what was once a thriving plaza.After a bomb kills one of the travellers, the survivor, a seal hunter played by Paul Newman, is sucked into playing a local board game called Quintet. As the film progresses, the sinister rules of the game are slowly revealed.Shaped like a pentagon, it becomes apparent that the Quintet game board resembles the layout of the film's ruined city. Similarly, when a player is "killed" on the game board, those who did the "killing" must literally assassinate the opposing player in real life. Presiding over this deadly game is a referee who strongly resembles the film's director, Robert Altman. He exists "out of the game world" and is treated as a God/Satan figure, playing devilish games of life and death with the poor humans. Furthermore, the film links the "five sides" of its city/game to what one character calls the "five stages of life". These stages are "primum" (the pain of birth), "secundum" (the labour of maturing), "tertium" (the guilt of living), "quartum" (the terror of ageing) and "quintum" (the finality of death).Altman thus takes this simple board game and uses it as a metaphor for the hopeless lives of Earth's few remaining survivors. This is an existential tale of humans coping with the imminence of death, our seal hunter hero surviving only because he plays by his own rules.On another level, the film seems to set up numerous Biblical and religious allusions, only to purposeful knock them back down. There are references to the birth of Christ, Joseph and Mary, Satan, Jesus, God, The Passover, St Christopher, white "doves", rituals etc, which Altman playfully introduces then promptly undermines. Altman loves to deconstruct myths, whether he does so here I'm not quite sure.6/10 – An inferior rip off of Bergman and Tarkovsky's "Stalker", much of this film simply consists of people huddled around a game board or walking in the snow. Chop 40 minutes from the film and you'd have a pretty decent flick, but as it is, there's not enough material or depth here to warrant a 2 hour running time. Worth one viewing.

Bookended by figures emerging and dissolving into a frozen wasteland and taking place in a bleak, hopeless near future where society presumably collapsed under the weight of some nameless disaster that left a world covered in ice and a number of survivors trying to survive on it, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Quintet is some kind of dystopian post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller. Not only it's not that but it's not really a fully fledged movie as much as a feature length essay on the basic philosophic idea that life can only be fully appreciated under the shadow of death, with a plot deliberately shaped as a chess game and dialogues often as wooden and posturized as something taken out of a Samuel Beckett play.I don't know what came first, the script or the location the movie was shot, a jambled mess of art installations forming the Man and His World Pavilion on St. Helen's Island, Montreal, originally built for the Expo 67 and left standing for years after. The first half hour can be a jarring experience, asking the viewer not only to abandon all familiar semiotics and landmarks one uses to navigate through a filmic universe much like real life and accept in their stead a convoluted world seen through an annoyingly soft focused lens (no doubt slapped with vaseline on the edges of the frame) where booze for some reason is called booza, people wear old Venezian hats and use a needlessly complicated information center made of revolving glass leaves, but to consider this cardboard version of the future within some realistic context. Which is nearly impossible given the absurdity of the plot and appears as an afterthought to give some additional credibility and dimension to what Altman is really going for. His little essay.The hopeless denizens of this bleak future spend their time playing a game called Quintet. Only the more foolhardy among them seem to have taken the game on the next level by organizing little tournaments of Quintet in real life. Paul Newman finds himself involved in one of them after his brother and pregnant girl are blown to bits by one of the participants. He then sleepwalks his way through two hours of cat-and-mouse absurdity peppered with philosophical rhetorics to finally receive a halfhearted explanation by the Judge of the game (an amicable fellow speaking in a heavy Italian accent played by Ferdinando Rey). An explanation which is ultimately weakened because the Judge had already revealed it 30 minutes ago - in his little talk about the point of the game, which is all that really matters here. No character is developed more than a pawn in a boarding game, not even Newman the protagonist, curiously wooden and uninterested in what's going on around him, although Ferdinando Rey seems to be enjoying the hell out of his role.Once you get past the slow start the film develops into a peculiarly riveting murder mystery but it never quite makes the cut as something genuinely inspired. Some of the ideas and themes explored are truly interesting, as for example the notion that it's the markers one carries that determine his identity, something he acquires or even steals (as does Newman who pretends to be Redstone by using his markers in order to take part in the Quintet game and discover who killed his brother) instead of being born with it, the five stages in life attended on all sides by the nothingness of death as explained by St. Christopher to his disciples, or perhaps even more so the idea of a judge tired of judging, wishfully ruminating how he would like for once to take part in the game instead of watch it unfold, perhaps follow the rules instead of interpret them.Obviously Quintet is not among Altman's best and if you'll get anything out of it or not largely depends on what level you're willing to engage it. As a dramatic work, it's undoubtedly a failure. On a dialectical level, as an essay of mostly philosophical nature, it's not bad at all.

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.

This is one of the many very good performances by Paul Newman, who was always underrated as an actor because of his all-encompassing beauty. The main problem with this movie, in my opinion, is the huge Vaseline budget they had. The whole movie was shot with Vaseline at the edges of the lens. I find that very annoying. When I make the effort to remember not to be annoyed by that "Vaseline experiment", I find it is not a bad movie by a long shot. The cast is brilliant, the futuristic plot is innovative for the period and the decor is intriguingly apt. The smearing of Vaseline on the lens applied to a whole movie may have been innovative, it was certainly daring, but I, for one, like to be able to look at the part of the screen I choose, and not be forbidden to have a clear look at the edges. CH