"The White Countess" was the last film made by the Merchant-Ivory partnership before Ismail Merchant's death. Most of their films were set either among the upper-middle-classes of England or America, or in Merchant's native India, but the setting for this one is, unusually, Shanghai in the late 1930s. Despite that setting, however, none of the major characters is actually Chinese.
The title character is Countess Sofia Belinskaya, one of a family of White Russian émigrés who have escaped the Bolshevik Revolution but have sunk into poverty in Shanghai, a city which at this period had a large European community. Sofia is forced to earn a living as a nightclub hostess. (It is hinted, but never definitely stated, that her work may involve an element of prostitution). Although her earnings are their only source of revenue, her snobbish aristocratic family look down on her because of her occupation which they regard as unworthy of a Countess; they even forbid her to mention her work in front of her young daughter, Katya. The family's great hope is to save enough money to escape to Hong Kong where they believe that they will have a better life than in Shanghai. This belief may well be mistaken, but for them Hong Kong takes on a significance similar to that of Moscow for Chekhov's Three Sisters. Chekhov, in fact, seems to have been an influence on Kazuo Ishiguro's screenplay, with its theme of impoverished Russian aristos.
The film deals with the romance which grows up between Sofia and Todd Jackson, a blind former American diplomat, who now runs his own nightclub. Over the course of the film we learn how Todd lost his sight, and also about another tragedy in his past. Todd invites Sofia to work in his club, paying her more than she earned in her previous job, and names it "The White Countess" in her honour.
Like most Merchant-Ivory dramas, this one is strong on period detail, but it is rather drab in appearance and lacks the visual appeal of some of James Ivory's earlier efforts. The film is slow-moving, but the same could be said about a number of Merchant-Ivorys, and this is not necessarily a fault. In my view the main drawback is that the emotional temperature is too low for what is, after all, a film about love and grief. I would not place the blame for this upon the actors; indeed, there are very creditable performances in the leading roles from the late Natasha Richardson and Ralph Fiennes, both playing characters desperately trying to find happiness after great misfortune and personal tragedy. Two of Sofia's older female relatives are played by Natasha's real-life mother Vanessa Redgrave and her aunt Lynn Redgrave. Fiennes, more normally seen as an upper-class Englishman, makes a convincing American (with an accent possibly based upon James Stewart's).
Rather surprisingly, in my view the main fault lies with the screenplay, even though it was written by a distinguished who was later to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Except at the very end when war breaks out between China and Japan, the script seems too bloodless, lacking both in dramatic tension and in passion. Stephen Holden of the "New York Times" said of the film that "What is missing ............. is a racing, dramatic pulse. Its sedate tone is simply too refined for the story it has to tell", and my own view would be similar. It is sad that the Merchant-Ivory partnership, which had been responsible for films as good as "The Europeans", "A Room with a View" and "Howard's End", could not have ended on a higher note. 6/10
The title character is Countess Sofia Belinskaya, one of a family of White Russian émigrés who have escaped the Bolshevik Revolution but have sunk into poverty in Shanghai, a city which at this period had a large European community. Sofia is forced to earn a living as a nightclub hostess. (It is hinted, but never definitely stated, that her work may involve an element of prostitution). Although her earnings are their only source of revenue, her snobbish aristocratic family look down on her because of her occupation which they regard as unworthy of a Countess; they even forbid her to mention her work in front of her young daughter, Katya. The family's great hope is to save enough money to escape to Hong Kong where they believe that they will have a better life than in Shanghai. This belief may well be mistaken, but for them Hong Kong takes on a significance similar to that of Moscow for Chekhov's Three Sisters. Chekhov, in fact, seems to have been an influence on Kazuo Ishiguro's screenplay, with its theme of impoverished Russian aristos.
The film deals with the romance which grows up between Sofia and Todd Jackson, a blind former American diplomat, who now runs his own nightclub. Over the course of the film we learn how Todd lost his sight, and also about another tragedy in his past. Todd invites Sofia to work in his club, paying her more than she earned in her previous job, and names it "The White Countess" in her honour.
Like most Merchant-Ivory dramas, this one is strong on period detail, but it is rather drab in appearance and lacks the visual appeal of some of James Ivory's earlier efforts. The film is slow-moving, but the same could be said about a number of Merchant-Ivorys, and this is not necessarily a fault. In my view the main drawback is that the emotional temperature is too low for what is, after all, a film about love and grief. I would not place the blame for this upon the actors; indeed, there are very creditable performances in the leading roles from the late Natasha Richardson and Ralph Fiennes, both playing characters desperately trying to find happiness after great misfortune and personal tragedy. Two of Sofia's older female relatives are played by Natasha's real-life mother Vanessa Redgrave and her aunt Lynn Redgrave. Fiennes, more normally seen as an upper-class Englishman, makes a convincing American (with an accent possibly based upon James Stewart's).
Rather surprisingly, in my view the main fault lies with the screenplay, even though it was written by a distinguished who was later to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Except at the very end when war breaks out between China and Japan, the script seems too bloodless, lacking both in dramatic tension and in passion. Stephen Holden of the "New York Times" said of the film that "What is missing ............. is a racing, dramatic pulse. Its sedate tone is simply too refined for the story it has to tell", and my own view would be similar. It is sad that the Merchant-Ivory partnership, which had been responsible for films as good as "The Europeans", "A Room with a View" and "Howard's End", could not have ended on a higher note. 6/10