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A sumptuous epic and war drama, The White Countess marks the
end of the Merchant-Ivory collaborative endeavor, which began in 1961 and lasted until
Ismail Merchant’s death in May 2005. The White Countess takes place during
1936-37, during the two-year period leading up to the Japanese invasion of China and the
outbreak of war between the two nations, known as the Sino-Japanese War. The story is set
in Shanghai, then a cosmopolitan global crossroads, full of uprooted political refugees
from Europe, Russia, Japan, and the Chinese civil war. Shanghai had an air about it of
tolerance, desperation, decadence, political tension--an oasis of unreality in a dangerous
and increasingly destabilizing world.
The White Countess is not typical of the painterly miniatures of
previous Merchant-Ivory productions, such as Remains
of the Day, The
Bostonians, or Howard’s’
End. It is more akin to David Lean’s sweeping epic of love amidst revolution,
Doctor
Zhivago, where revolutionary upheaval becomes the terrifying sublime backdrop to
what is a essentially a love story. Natasha Richardson, who plays the titular displaced
White Russian countess, bears the terrible burdens of her family’s and her
country’s fate, while delivering a graceful, restrained performance as a still
elegant and beautiful noblewoman reduced to taxi-dancing and other, unmentionable
services.
The widowed Countess Sofia Belinskaya must support her extended
family, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, daughter, aunt and uncle. Shrewish, judgmental
mother-in-law Olga (played by Richardson’s real-life aunt Lynn Redgrave) and
sister-in-law Greshenka (Madeleine Potter) constantly rebuke and condemn Sophia, all the
while attempting to "save" the Countess’s daughter Katya (Madeleine Daly)
from her mother’s fate and reputation by stealing the child from the reach of
Sofia’s motherly love.
One evening Sofia’s conversation in a chance encounter with a
social acquaintance from the old days, a Russian prince now reduced to working as a
porter, is overheard. The diplomat Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes) seems to be some sort of
businessman who has taken some serious knocks in recent times. He has only recently lost
his sight and is becoming increasingly eccentric. Indeed, his present fascination with
Shanghai night life, frequenting its bars and clubs nightly, is becoming a problem for his
company’s board members. Even as his colleagues are planning to have Jackson
dismissed, Jackson himself places a highly risky bet at the race track--and he wins a
small fortune, enabling him to open up the nightclub of his dreams, The White Countess.
Jackson, it turns out, had been instrumental in founding the now
failing League of Nations. All around him the world provides evidence that peace and
idealism are a fool’s mission. The vision of his White Countess night club is a
painterly miniature of an exciting world, tinged with danger but ultimately safely
contained. His vision is a private one of aesthetic perfection, designed to keep away the
chaos and randomness of the world. As the centerpiece of his club he envisions the perfect
hostess, Sofia Belinskaya, the White Countess herself. Such perfection can never be
sustained in a real world filled with imperfections, base motivations, the spirit of
bellicosity, large, invisible malignant forces--and the seemingly benign Mr. Matsuda
(Hiroyuki Sanada) will see to that.
Merchant and Ivory paint a large, brilliant, detailed canvas—the
multicultural, cosmopolitan International Quarter, filled with high classes and low. The
recently fallen and the seemingly rising fortunes of rivaling political factions and the
fantasy nightclub itself are dramatically realized through ever-changing set styles
recreating the cosmopolitan culture that once was Shanghai. There seems an undercurrent of
irony—even as China and Shanghai are finally re-emerging to a level of power and
glory on the world stage not seen since the 1930s, the whole world once again seems caught
up in violent political intrigue, disillusionment with the United Nations’ ability to
maintain world peace, and the ever-increasing threat of global cataclysm.
- Les Wright
