Quartet is a 1981 period drama film directed by James Ivory from a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on the 1928 novel by Jean Rhys.

The film stars Alan Bates, Maggie Smith, Isabelle Adjani and Anthony Higgins, and is set in 1927 Paris.

The strain of living with the Heidlers begins to manifest itself; Marya becomes desperate to leave, and begs Lois to loan her money so she can get away.

[1] Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times said that "whether the arc of Marya's fate feels overly engineered to you or not, Quartet retains its power to unsettle in its accumulation of cuts and bruises, the rare Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala effort that mines a glamorized past not for nuanced dignity but for a kind of elegant, honest sordidness".

[2] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 62 out of 100, based on 7 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

[4] Variety wrote: "Director James Ivory takes his usual aloofly observant distance and the film's love triangle loses some drastic impetus".