.MOVIE LISTINGS | MOVIE REVIEW ARCHIVE | THEATER INFO Shanghai on the Brink A final collaboration of Merchant and Ivory BY MOLLY TEMPLETON THE WHITE COUNTESS: Directed by James Ivory. Written by Kazuo Ishiguro. Produced by Ismail Merchant. Cinematography, Christopher Doyle. Production design, Andrew Sanders. Editor, John David Allen. Costume design, John Bright. Music, Richard Robbins. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave, Hiroyuki Sanada, Madeleine Potter and Madeleine Daly. Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. PG-13. 135 minutes. It would be difficult to watch The White Countess without considering its place as the last chapter in a long and remarkable list of Merchant Ivory films. Ismail Merchant, who was most often a producer but also directed, died last May. His 44-year collaboration with James Ivory produced more than 30 films, including a delightful adaptation of E.M. Forster's A Room With a View and the Oscar-nominated Howards End (also a Forster adaptation). But not every Merchant Ivory production was quite as successful, and while The White Countess is not as forgettable as, say, Le Divorce, it is also not up to par with the team's best work. Natasha Richardson as Countess Sofia Belinsky. In 1936 Shanghai, displaced Russian countess Sofia Belinsky (Natasha Richardson) is working as a "bar girl," the only breadwinner keeping afloat her family — nasty mother-in-law Olga (Lynn Redgrave), self-righteous sister-in-law Greshenka (Madeleine Potter), sweet aunt Sara (Vanessa Redgrave) and uncle Peter (John Wood) and Sofia's daughter Katya (Madeleine Daly). One night, Sofia deftly rescues blind American Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes) from a pair of would-be thieves. Jackson, a former diplomat, has turned eccentric since tragedy took his family and then his sight. After meeting Sofia, he wanders Shanghai's nightlife with Mr. Matsuda (Hiroyuki Sanada), theorizing about the idea of a perfect bar. To Jackson, the bar requires something extraordinary — something he perceives in Sofia. A bit of luck at the racetrack brings Jackson enough cash to build his dream bar (which he names The White Countess), and to hire Sofia, though it's not exactly clear what she does, beyond dress snappily and chat. With the help of the elegantly ominous Matsuda, the place is a hit. But Sofia's family still looks down on her, even when she brings home enough cash to help them in their ever more pressing need to escape Shanghai. The White Countess's twin tensions — Sofia and her family, Sofia and Jackson — amble along slowly until the movie's last half hour, when the imminent arrival of the Japanese military forces each character to action. The final act is sometimes tense, but it's too little too late for a movie that spent the better part of two hours pushing emotional resonance and urgency to the background, victims of hesitant pacing and too-long scenes. Jackson and Sofia's relationship, too, comes together with a forced quickness, implying a longing that neither actor convincingly projects. Where The White Countess most succeeds is in its sense of place. Cinematogra-pher Christopher Doyle and production designer Andrew Sanders turn Shanghai, with its wan light, claustrophobic streets, crowded waterfront and lovely gardens, into the movie's most interesting character. The city on the brink of war is a fascinating historical setting, and some of the movie's best scenes begin to explore the relationships between people of many nationalities living under strange conditions in a city they've had to make their home. Richardson is luminous as Sofia, but the character, despite her bravery, is bland, eternally good, pure-of-heart and put upon from almost all sides. As Jackson, Fiennes sometimes slips into an entertaining sort of bravado, his delivery like that of a different era's movie star, but the performance is strangely inconsistent. He seems to divert most of his effort to his character's accent and blindness, leaving Jackson's repressed feelings too far under the surface. Director James Ivory has done repressed emotions before, and better, in 1993's The Remains of the Day. Remains was adapted from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro; Countess is an original screenplay by Ishiguro, leaving me to wonder if the story, in the hands of such a talented novelist, would simply have made a better book than a movie. The White Countess opens Friday, March 24 at the Bijou.
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