I was always intrigued by the existence of Quintet (1979), a poorly-reviewed box office flop and low point in both director Robert Altman and actor Paul Newman’s careers. As a kid leafing through my Mum’s Paul Newman books, the idea of a sci-fi flick about a death game sounded great, but this was before the idea of a sci-fi film directed by Robert Altman would seem a perplexing outlier. The opening images of Newman as Essex, and his companion Vivia (Brigette Fossey), obscured in giant furs as they trudge through the blinding white arctic landscape did place me in the mind of Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and in several ways, this is almost similar in what he did with the western genre, now applied to science-fiction: making it dirty-looking, depressing and unappealing. Adding to the visuals is the decision to film many scenes with the circular edges of the frame obscured and fuzzy, so that only the middle circle is clear and visible; the effect is like looking through a frosted window. Essex and Vivia arrive at a city where dogs feed on corpses left outside and people in the ruins of a complex entertain themselves with a game called Quintet – even though apparently Altman and his team worked out the rules of the game, it’s never explained effectively to the viewer. Basically Essex finds his long lost brother, but his brother has already been earmarked for another game of Quintet organised by the judge (Fernando Rey) and including an international cast of actors as the players – Vittorio Gassman, Bibi Andersson, Nina Van Pallandt, David Langton. Yet the stakes are deadly and when things take a destructive turn for Essex, he decides to play. The movie fights against any audience satisfaction with the idea of a revenge narrative, and it’s more about how people entertain themselves when death is inevitable and there’s no hope – this is as bleak a dystopia as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The aesthetic feels like one of those TV productions of Shakespeare – ornate costumes and plotting in clunky sets. It was a bit tough to get through, particularly watching it late at night on a Friday, but I was still glad to have seen it, and there is something to its absolute resistance to satisfying an audience in any conventional ways. Newman is a reliable everyman, even though audiences have already figured out what’s going on and the existential themes before he has. The dramatic, and at times overwhemling, score by Tom Pierson adds a lot to the foreboding tone of the movie. I streamed an HD copy available on YouTube. Recommended, if you dare.
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