everything you have heard about this movie is true.

A different way of telling a story

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

...now I wish it had remained that way.WARNING: If you stumble upon this movie while surfing TV, keep surfing!This isn't even a good one time watch. It's the most boring, senseless piece of trash I've ever watched. I can't believe someone made this move. I can't believe Paul Newman signed on to play in this movie. I can't believe it was ever released.This is a bad, bad, bad, movie.

When Robert Altman's relations with 20th Century-Fox were increasingly worsening, he made "Quintet" and "HealtH", sold his production company Lion's Gate, and started shooting Jules Feiffer's script of "Popeye" for Disney and Paramount, a move that in a way signaled a rupture with his previous cinema, centered on the survey of American institutions and film genres. "Quintet" is a cryptic, enigmatic science-fiction drama that takes place in a decimated, permanently cold world. A hunter (Paul Newman) and his pregnant wife (Brigitte Fossey) arrive to the only community of human survivors. The woman is killed —eliminating the possibility of new life— and the hunter participates in a game called quintet, associated (as it has been said somewhere else) with five stages of life: the pain of birth, the strain of maturation, the guilt of existence, the terror of aging, and the finality of death. Altman himself invented the game (which I never understood, to tell the truth, but I could not care less), and the player that loses must die in real life, as the hunter, who has to fight for his life. Photographed by Jean Boffety with a permanent filter that diffuses the corners of the frame, and shot almost entirely inside the abandoned installations of Expo 67 in Montréal (except for the opening and ending, photographed in frozen exteriors), duplicating the feeling of loss and ruin, while the wardrobe adds the sensation of timelessness and worldliness, "Quintet" is a nihilistic vision of the world that some see as the third film of a surrealist trilogy, also conformed by Altman's "Images" and "3 Women". Besides American Newman and French Fossey, the international cast includes Spaniard Fernando Rey, Italian Vittorio Gassmann, Swedish Bibi Andersson, and Danish Nina Van Pallandt. An attractive cinematic experience, it is science fiction "a la Altman", who was not precisely a master of all genres, but a filmmaker who liked to revise them and come out with something else, usually interesting.

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.