'Quartet' is the story of a girl who, adrift with her feckless husband amid the literati of glittering Paris in the 1920's, becomes entrapped by a rich and sybaritic English couple. From the wistful melancholy of the autobiographical novel by Jean Rhys, 'Quartet' is full of intense confrontations dazzlingly acted by Alan Bates, Maggie Smith, Anthony Higgins, and Isabelle Adjani. The characters act out their passions not only in the usual seedy cafes and louche hotels of Rhys' Parisian novels but also the smoky jazz haunts and lavish settings of a James Ivory film. Nevertheless, 'Quartet' remains, in theme, one of the Merchant Ivory team's darkest and most compelling dramas of relationships dangerously intertwined.