The White Countess  PG

SCREENINGS

7.30pm  Saturday 20 May 2006

7.30pm  Sunday 21 May 2006

Set in Shanghai in the late 1930s, this is the story of the relationship between a disillusioned former US diplomat Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes) and refugee White Russian Countess Sofia Belinskya (Natasha Richardson) who is reduced to a sordid life in the city's bars to support members of her dead husband's aristocratic family.

BBFC advice:   Contains mild violence, peril and sex references

"The last in the long, distinguished line of Merchant-Ivory collaborations — Ismail Merchant having died during production — is, as you would expect, a handsome, well-acted period evocation with attractive credentials. The original screenplay is by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (whose Remains Of The Day was turned into one of the highlights in James Ivory’s oeuvre) and its moody melodrama is clearly indebted to Casablanca.

There is nothing ‘bad’ here — indeed, it has moments of poignancy, a striking climax (the blind Jackson feeling his way through a panicked populace and invading Japanese soldiers) and a lovely dramatic ending, although the political, Cabaret-flavoured intrigue is sketchy and Sofia’s loyalty to her cruelly ungrateful, la-di-dah in-laws is incomprehensible.

Trouble is, James Ivory just doesn’t do sleaze.  The tawdry milieu of taxi dancers, pleasure-seekers and spies rings hollow.  You’ve never seen such well-scrubbed tarts and sailors, while the White Countess bar — far from the dive of Jackson’s poetic fantasy, with its own energy and character — looks like an RKO set where Fred and Ginger should come twirling down the staircase any second.

So it falls heavily to Fiennes to ground the film and he is thankfully impeccable, inching from bitter bereavement and deluded escapism to emotional rescue.

Verdict
A potentially compelling situation doesn’t really come off, though Fiennes and Richardson (at her best) are moving."
Angie Errigo, Empire Online

"Ismail Merchant's final collaboration with James Ivory, and it has all the virtues and flaws that made their work so instantly recognisable.  The plot creaks like a rusty hinge, but there's a daring about the way Kazuo Ishiguro's screenplay needles a raw nerve in Chinese history..."

The Times

CAST  Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave, Hiroyuki Sanada

DIRECTOR  James Ivory

RUNNING TIME  138 mins

COUNTRY  UK / USA / Germany / China

http://www.sonypictures.co.uk/movies/whitecountess/index.html

http://imdb.com/title/tt0384686