A James Ivory film, and a posthumous film for his longtime producer Ismail Merchant, on which their longtime screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, was supplanted by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Remains of the Day yielded one of the better Ivory-Merchant-Jhabvala collaborations. The present collaboration is not nearly as good, which is a bit of a puzzle, even conceding a somewhat stilted and pedantic script, because it had plenty of other reasons to be good. It has the masterly cinematographer, Wong Kar-wai's main man, Christopher Doyle. It has a redolent romantic setting, Shanghai in the mid-to-late Thirties, a crossroads of political intrigue, a gathering place for the fallen and the dissolute, an exotic ambience worthy of von Sternberg (cf. Shanghai Express and The Shanghai Gesture, to stay strictly in the vicinity). It has Natasha Richardson, who is no Dietrich, nor even a Tierney, but is more of an actress than either, as a widowed and exiled Russian noble, now toiling in disrepute as a taxi dancer in a single "shabby" gown, battling at home for control of her daughter against her disapproving in-laws. And it has Ralph Fiennes as a blind and also widowed American diplomat, once "the last hope for the League of Nations," but now dedicated to a less lofty goal, the creation of "the bar of my dreams," to be financed with winnings from the racetrack and hosted by, as well named after, the debased Russian noble, The White Countess of the title. Somehow the heady brew fails to come to a boil, remains stubbornly tepid, stubbornly placid, even upon entrance into the race-against-time climax, a cliffhanger with two kinds of love in peril, the maternal and the amorous. Ivory has never been a natural, always been an earnest and lately a capable striver, and here his discreetness, his obliqueness, of approach (his, or his self-willed cinematographer's) strives to be Wong-ian, more than Sternberg-ian, but he lacks the eye for it, the feel for it. Soft focus, smudged color, smeary light will not fill in a deficient atmosphere. The hero's blindness, all too clearly metaphorical ("Why do you have such heavy doors? You think they'll keep out the world?"), might be a broader metaphor than intended. Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave, Hiroyuki Sanada. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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