Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
The White Countess (2005)
Shanghai in the 1930s was cosmopolitan and endangered, flourishing under the shadow of China’s civil war and Japanese militarism. The White Countess (2005)—available on Amazon Prime—catches the peculiar ambience of a city where rickshaws, motor cars and electric trolleys rattle down streets filled with people in European and Asian dress. It’s a place of desperate poverty and lavish spending, a transit stop for refugees from Nazism and Bolshevism and expatriates from many nations.
Sofia (Natasha Richardson) lives in spacious squalor with her daughter and several in-laws. They are aristocrats but their titles are meaningless in present circumstances. Refugees from the Soviet Union, they have recreated a little Russia in their tenement, drinking tea in glasses and lighting candles before icons. Sofia’s occupation—deemed the world’s oldest by some—is disdained by her sister-in-law. Nonetheless, the family is willing to take the money she earns. Without Sofia’s forays into Shanghai’s demimonde, the family might starve.
One night, Sofia encounters an American gentleman at a night club. Todd (Ralph Fiennes) is blind as well as blind drunk much of the time; once a respected Foreign Service officer, he’s at loose ends, occupying an unchallenging sinecure with an American trading company. Sofia saves Todd from being robbed by pretending he’s a customer and guides him safely from the club. The gesture of random kindness is repaid. Todd dreams of his own night club, and when he opens The White Countess, she will be “the centerpiece”—no sex work, just hostess and public face of the upscale dance club whose house band is a multiple mixed-race jazz orchestra.
Sofia and Todd have both suffered great loss. She has lost her country, her fortune and a portion of her self-respect. He lost his wife years ago; his eyesight and young daughter in a terrorist bombing. Both have lost sight of much of the purpose they once had.
Although weary, they continue searching for their next chapter. “This is Shanghai—a person can do as they please,” Todd tells his prim assistant from the trading company. Maybe so. “In a place like this you should be able to forget the world outside,” he mentions. Alas, the outside world will come crashing through.
The White Countess is Merchant Ivory’s final production before the death of producer Ismail Merchant. Unlike most of their films, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala sat this one out, turning writing duties over to Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day). The White Countess is languidly paced and organized as a sequence of conversations between Sofia and her family, Sofia and Todd and Todd and the mysterious Japanese agent Mr. Matsuda (Hiroyuki Sanada). Befitting Merchant Ivory, the tone is elevated and elegant and the cast top drawer with performances by Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave. Between Sofia and Todd sputters perhaps the slowest moving romance in cinema.
