Arizona Republic
by Richard Nilsen
January 27, 2006
The White Countess is the final Merchant-Ivory film. Ismail Merchant died in May 2005, just after it was finished.
The filmmaking team of Merchant and James Ivory, with their frequent screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, have made a rich haul in the Oscar field, with such successful films as The Remains of the Day, Howards End and A Room With a View.
Their films have become so synonymous with English upper-class lip-stiffening that it's always a shock to remember that none of them is English: Ivory is American, Merchant was Indian and Jhabvala was born in Germany and married an Indian.
The White Countess, although it has its share of Masterpiece Theatre moments, is another film to remind us just how cosmopolitan is the Merchant-Ivory filmography. It's set in Shanghai in 1936, just before the Japanese invasion of China, and features Russian émigrés, an American diplomat and a Japanese war profiteer.
And it was written by the Japanese-born English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who also wrote The Remains of the Day.
It presents us with a cosmopolitan world, constantly shifting, with shifting and adaptable values. And although we frequently associate the Merchant-Ivory films with manor houses and Henry James, most of their films take a surprisingly broad view of the world: From Shakespeare Wallah, set in India, to Mystic Masseur, set in Trinidad, they have wandered the world and given us characters of widely varied nationality and economic circumstance.
The White Countess follows two strands: In one a family of White Russian émigrés, forced to flee Russia after the revolution, lives in straitened circumstances in Shanghai. Of them, only Sofia (Natasha Richardson) - once Countess Belinsky - has the gumption to make a living, working in Shanghai's disreputable dance halls.
The other strand is the disillusioned American diplomat, Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), who now works for an American corporation but who dreams of owning the "perfect" Shanghai bar and dance hall. It's as if the dissolution of the world, under his control almost as if it were theater, is preferable to the real dissolution outside his door, as World War II threatens.
Of course, the two strands meet and entwine, with the help of a mysterious Japanese businessman (Hiroyuki Sanada) who may have ulterior motives.
This film has many of the familiar problems of the Merchant-Ivory films: too often too pretty; too little surprising mise-en-scène (the films are quite conventional); often too slow, even static. But it also shares the virtues: great acting (the entire Redgrave family seems to be represented in the cast), and the cosmopolitanism that all M-I films share.
This cosmopolitanism can liberate us and is the opposite of mere multiculturalism, which too often is really just an excuse to remain mired in provincialism: "My provincialism is of equal value with yours."
Merchant and Ivory have always shown us the door to the wider world.
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