Quintet (1979)

In my blissful youth, I watched lots of obscure and unorthodox films on late-night TV that ended my dogma of what good cinema was like and, it might be said, changed me a bit. Among those, the 1970s sci-fi films in particular were hypnotic. Phase IV, Zardoz, A Boy & His Dog, Silent Running – jarring music, lackadaisical pace, sere mood, subdued acting, muted action. These odd little wild-cards, scrutinised on a square-foot screen in silent darkness, frequently with a reception that looked like a swarm of angry bees in a snowstorm, were mesmerizingly different to movies from before their historical moment and after it; they felt as alien as you might in fact think films about aliens should do. They tantalised me and felt like they had slipped through a net of homogeneity. But I did not see Quintet at that time. If I had, I might well have announced “possibly a bit too heterogenous” (or words to that effect) and this, I submit, would have been admirably fair of me. As American films go, and as I will explain, Quintet is rather lacking in the noble virtue of compromise. And that’s Robert Altman all over, I suppose.

A common derivation for the life-changing films mentioned above can be fairly easily traced. When a commercially minded director plots his next appalling move, the art film is not first among his considerations. Nonetheless, even American hacks may be suddenly afflicted with aspirations. They start to daydream that the world, from gas-pump attendants to academic conferences, awaits their philosophical wanking but, dilemma!, they are acutely aware that a financial sacrifice traditionally follows and they're less persuaded of the honour in this. However, for these sleazy but pompous jerks, an agreeable balance happily presents itself - "set it in the future" - and that is how we get great science-fiction films instead of American art-films. 

By this subterfuge, they can indulge their pretentious fancy and do an egghead what-if fable but still pacify the raptorish venality of the studio accountants, just as their Soviet counterparts could sometimes use the genre to slink past the paranoia of state censors. SF serves a handy double purpose, as do all abstract narrative conceits - to refract and to deflect, to crystallise a critique but backhand the backlash. "No, no! It's not about that! It's just a story about aliens and robots." So advantageous is this method that even haughty Euro-minxes like Godard and Marker were seen to abscond from the mighty palace of High Modernism for dalliances in the video-game arcade of sci-fi and imaginary futures, with austere and slightly cramped results (trampy Truffaut was more at ease). 

But Altman was one of the only American film-makers who didn’t even need to turn to sci-fi to make an art film. He'd been allowed, presumably with an indolent shrug from some coke-addled mogul in the middle of a blowjob, to do the real thing. Nonchalant about his rare privilege, he did his own sci-fi movie anyway, perhaps because if you tried the story in any real historical period, it would quickly become apparent that it doesn't work in any real historical period. If you haven't seen Quintet and suddenly feel gripped with trepidation that the great auteur succumbed to a grubby cash-in during the space-movie craze, let me dispel your concerns. Altman is immutable, his malaise-addled sensibility bearing as much relation to Star Wars as McCabe & Mrs Miller does to The Magnificent Seven. 

Just like that sourpuss cowboy movie, Altman once again favours an entirely snow-buried landscape to match the icy, funereal tone of Quintet (and possibly a tribute to the source of his funding as alleged in the previous paragraph). The whole thing is a more extreme and strenuously realised version of the approach Altman already took in McCabe & Mrs Miller. Critics have been conditioned to pounce on the metaphor of Altman “out in the cold” at this point in his career but it feels like they’re trailing way behind Altman himself in spotting the parallel, as if he’s choosing the settings to match his own sense of his liberatingly leprous place in the industry.

So, taking it from the top - where are we in Quintet? Are we in the Arctic?  Maybe, it looks a bit like it, maybe - then we see a frozen old train. No, we reason cautiously, not the Arctic. A suitably jarring start to proceedings. As the credits play, we’re soused in solitude, in snow and ice, settling into long shots that, not for the last time in this film, luxuriate in how long it takes tiny figures to cross a screen-filling vivid-ish white vista. The mood chiselled out in these brief introductory moments never thaws for the rest of the film, from that opening pilgrimage to that quite forlorn closing reprise, in between which the hero, named Essex, swaggers cowboy-like back into town after years away and, in this case and surely predictably, finds that it’s not only become a pseudo-medieval ice-palace (where the drab Middle Ages fashion makes the place look like a morose Christmas card) but furthermore that they’re living a paranoid existence based round a mystery list of names marked for death. We, tenterhooked viewers, raptly accede to all this, no time for questions. Onwards. 

He arrives with the only woman to be pregnant for years, but this isn’t Children of Men. Civilization is over and in reverse, matched by a thumb-sucking regression into infantilism when anyone remembers the past. We nod confidently, we wave that through. Of course they do. The urge to make sense of his personal loss keeps Essex around, and the wan wish that we might eventually make sense of anything we’ve seen for the last half hour keeps us around, surrounded by the intermittent rumble of ice floes and creaking glaciers, and glass panels of 20^th century photographs including one of Robert Oppenheimer. So we all stay, long enough to watch the characters play out their daisy-chain of doom. 

Bobby O’s little cameo tells us what kind of permanent winter we’re looking at, but it’s not worth putting too much interpretive weight on an environment that only really exists as a convenience for the film's theme. There is no end of implausible things in this setting, but they’re all implausible on the same level that makes “Commend me to my kind lord, O farewell” a long speech if you’ve just had your throat fatally crushed. Taken in the right spirit, they’re easy enough to roll with and other sci-fi directors would count on that for our seamless assimilation into the world of the given scenario. But in Quintet all the aspects that cause us difficulties are confrontationally accentuated, the kind of challenge to an audience that marks a long-lost era of risk-taking in cinema.

In practice, the extremism of avant-garde cinema translates to the holistic subversion of “audience expectations”, those frivolous inanities that so richly deserve the cold piss of genius upon them and o let every walk-out and ticket refund be sweetly cherished. Quintet displays precisely that species of antagonistic peculiarity. From beginning to end, it is visually distorted with a lens filter that creates a diffuse blur round the edges of the frame (it’s not Vaseline, dummies) so that as the camera moves, the thing you were just looking at turns into a blob and you can only ever see semi-clearly through an oval in the middle of the screen. Bobby A must have had a call or two from the investors about that, but it’s only the beginning of all the film’s disorientations. 

As we sift our way through strangely costumed actors performing made-up behavioural customs that go unexplained (an ambient oddness reminiscent of The Prisoner), we also struggle with a plot made up of brutally truncated developments, set-ups that exist only to jolt us with how quickly they’re knocked down, a string of anti-climaxes to make sure no heroics spoil the methodically disheartening mood. What storyline we do get is both skeletal and contorted by its own determination to trip us up, leaving Altman more space to concentrate on visual interest, which of course he doesn't use. Perversely he guides the mise en scene entirely into displeasing our eye, confined to ugly stifling interiors. The most vital development in progressive 70s art cinema was this adamant rejection of eye-candy compositions, to strip away cinema’s lulling, hypnagogic qualities, though the idea mainly clustered around the mid-70s (Numero Deux,  Winstanley, frisky date movies like that) so Altman did the Lord’s work in trying to keep it going as late as ’79. If the style of the film spoke to us directly, it would tell us this is auteur fuck-you-ism and nobody’s going to hold your mitten to lead you through the movie, you gormless proles. In Altman's hands, the world we know today is lost and it’s not coming back, so it’s only right that we too, let it be said without false pride, are also rather lost as we watch the film and it’s pretty much going to stay that way.

Our confusion is exacerbated by a full gauntlet of added hurdles. Unorthodox casting plays, if you will allow this apt turn of phrase, its part, with European actors of half a dozen different accents banded together in a modern Babel, as ever without explanation. And it's a fine bit of snook-cocking to see screen giga-idol (ok, mega) Paul Newman so disruptively cast against type, a pretty movie star who has made the matinee his bitch as the charming alpha, here a mumbling beat-up old fuck in a shitty grey stained room, huddled in rags to keep warm and devoid of emotional expression, which we will assume is a deliberate acting choice. Our gushing approval might be a touch more reserved here, though.  Casting Newman against Europeans just for the assumed weirdness of it slumps the whole thing into the middle American xenophobia which has long been such a blessing for the rest of us, as if the main trauma from global genocide would be all the suavely sinuous elocutions left behind, and it might be unduly generous to assume this was an intended irony. 

I guess a certain kind of viewer would fault some of the gore fx or dead-face acting, but I don’t think they’re worth fussing over in this case, given how much effort it puts into telling you to skip home and watch Lassie if you can’t engage with it on a purely hermeneutic level. The acting, the set-design, the intrusive camera-frost, the grimness do everything to keep us at bay, to make us scrabble weakly and tentatively at the unyielding surface to decipher what we’re seeing, like a cat listlessly dabbing its paw at a patio door to get in when there’s nobody visible on the other side. But sure enough, some provocative signs of movement can be spotted on that other side if we peer stubbornly enough, maybe just enough to make our eyes widen and our tails quiver.

Quintet goes big on symbolism, something I don’t unambivalently condone in films, but films set in their own hermetic future are ideal for suspension of disbelief (which, as TS Eliot says about Dante, doesn’t mean we have to buy into the bullshit) because of the rebuking obstacle they inherently present to literalism, and so have a slightly better chance of being given poetic licence by audiences otherwise repeatedly suckled at the tedious teat of Mama Mimesis (here we go again). I’ve genuinely never seen anyone try to crack this film’s code before (it’s not that critics haven’t noticed it, it’s just that they think being archly dismissive will score them more points with their friends), so let’s take a wild swing at it even if we don’t knock it out of the park (Bletchley Park). 

The main symbols of the film are ice, fire, the goose, the dogs and possibly the train. My current guess is, ice stands for oblivion, fire is the Hell of life (and fire and Quintet are linked), the dogs represent death, the goose represents hope and the train is a reminder of the collapse of civilization (civilization being founded upon the ability to connect distant places with transportation systems, as well as upon truffles and discreet advice about inappropriate hats).

The goose starts us off with an unexpected omen of life to the North, and Vivia (name means life, ooh, write that down) is doubly linked to the goose through sayings about golden eggs, which backs up a glum interpretation of the ending. The counterpointed black Rottweillers of death are everywhere through the film, and the survivors have assimilated mortality so blithely that they’ve built not very good statues of the dogs eating a corpse as a conversation-sparking centrepiece, resigned to all becoming chew-toys in the fullness of time. It would make a suitably bold statement for a corporate foyer. In short, Vivia has no place in this thanatotic dump. 

So how do you pass the time from here to extinction? Presumably not at your highest ebb, and this is where St Christopher comes in with his false gospel of black-metal miserablism. I gather that St Christopher is the patron saint of travellers and since this St Christopher tries to kill the only traveller he knows, we can probably take his name and his sermon as ironic (and, double-irony, he’s trying to kill the wrong man). In one shot, Essex is looking at a picture of a goose when St Christopher steps through, in front of it – blocking out the hint of hope while simultaneously revealing that the goose’s image was a doorway! Ahh! Mmm. Erm...

Fire appears at three key points in the film, not including the fact that the title “Quintet” appears over fire:

i)                    a woman is so numb that, when she realises her husband is dead, she burns her hand just to feel something;

ii)                   St Christopher preaches his new religion of nihilism and says that, in the past, people believed we would live in eternal fire but now we know there is no Hell, only the void, and the pain of life is to be masochistically savoured because it’s not nothingness (sounds like Altman bracing himself for the reviews)

iii)                 Essex rejects Quintet by making Grigor smell the physical reality of death, hidden by the frozen preservation of the other victims, when he throws the last body on the fire as if she were an animal sacrifice, which is surely no way to decline a perfectly sociable offer of a murder-game.

Quintet the game, like burning your hand because pain is the only remaining sign you’re alive, or like watching E!, inspires the precious feeling of life through dread and horror, and keeps the void at bay by creating a living Hell instead. Essex chooses to follow the goose despite the vast improbability of a good outcome because living in self-inflicted pain just to deny your terminal reality is worse than just facing the void; it’s one thing to live in a fool’s paradise, but living in a fool’s shitheap really has little to recommend it. In the (excellent) last shot, he trudges back out into the ice and snow one last time, the obstinate defiance of either hope or longanimity, while the orchestral score blares and careens cacophonously like a drunken Mahler, ie like Mahler. 

Some people take his gradual oblivion by white-out to mean that he dies foolishly, and Altman is on record as one of them, so the ending is a literalised Wild Goose Chase. If we go with that, it might seem a bit glib, and glibness I shall not abide, but less so if we see his final choice as complete in itself.  Never mind if he ends up a popsicle or not; whether he turns out to be right or wrong about the possible haven elsewhere, or right but too weak to ever make it there, could be construed as irrelevant. As long as he’s motivated by either hope or Hemingwayish stoicism, he has reached his equilibrium - those are both self-validating choices if you have to live with defeat. And the goose clearly knows something, anyway. It is the height of hubris to argue with a goose. 

                                                                                               ***

Robert Altman's film might just be genuinely singular - finding any suitable matches calls for an algorithm. Indications that Mr. Banal Otter has been watching Tarkovsky before he makes this one are hardly covert but the results have nothing much in common with the dopey Russian’s epiphanic escapes from his ungrateful anomie, squirming counter-revolutionarily against the mighty Bear’s loving hug. Cryptic conversations while everyone waits around for the end in a doomed ice-packed future sounds a bit like Beckett and a lot like JG Ballard but again Quintet feels nothing like either. Beckett would never stoop to a plot. JGB always conveys a lofty neutrality wafted to us on the breeze down from Olympus, an aristocratic fatalism that finds beauty in apocalypse. Altman’s vision of the end is acrid, belittling, dingy and impotently, churlishly surly, at least until Essex’s final obliquely transcendent renunciation of the unfun game he leaves behind. 

Fatal white-out or not, that indication of some belief in some sort of future means we don’t have to go along with the know-it-all pessimism Altman expects us to preen ourselves with. Altman himself is, I think, probably fussing away at his dull feathers but a couple of other options are there if we want to pursue them. 

You could easily see Quinet as dreary nihilism, an existentialist despair that all life can ever be is an arbitrary game of futile savagery in a howling void, and if you live in Kent that might seem like the most obvious interpretation, but St Christopher’s teen Goth poetry isn’t presented as a level-headed observation. Or you could imagine Essex finds a better life, and bless your cotton socks if you do. Or you could take it as a political film, bordering on Marxist, as a metaphor for alienation under capitalist totalitarianism in the freezing shadow of a dead left where the spectre that once haunted Europe is now just a ghost. 

A left-wing take on Quintet would mean thinking of it as a negative example; like Threads a few years later, it explores what a morally emaciated world looks like with no social connections, with no clear sense of the past, with no prospects of change for the better – shuffling round an empty shabby city, playing a stupid lethal game just to trick themselves out of suicide. Their meaninglessness is our meaningless existence without class consciousness. It’s too late for them, and it’s sort of too late for us if the only choice is to push on regardless. You wish you could argue back, and say it’s not too late, and this isn’t helping things, Mr Altman; and you’d be right to do it, by all means, but I’d say he’s clearly right to feel less than buoyant.