Search
What's Hot
Day-by-Day Fall Schedule
Idol Winner Speaks!
Jim Parsons Comes Out
Game of Thrones Star's Sex Stare

The White Countess

2005, Movie, PG-13, 135 mins

The White Countess: Review

WHITE COUNTESS, THE
starstarstarstar
James Ivory and Ismail Merchant's final film together finds them once again working alongside Japanese-born novelist/screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro (THE REMAINS OF THE DAY). This time, however, the collaboration bears far less satisfying fruit. Shanghai, 1936. Shattered by the loss of his wife, his two children and his eyesight, and thoroughly disillusioned by the failure of the League of Nations to keep China safe from external Japanese attack and an internal civil war, former U.S. diplomat Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes, with an American accent that sounds more like matinee idols of the period than real life) is now content to lend his good name to Western business interests and while away the wee hours in Shanghai's less-reputable establishments. Jackson's dream is to open his own club, staffed with handpicked bouncers who would orchestrate the action inside like musical conductors, and filled with hired dancers poised perfectly between the erotic and the tragic. The centerpiece for this grand vision would be White Russian countess Sofia Belinsky (Natasha Richardson), whom Jackson meets one night in a dance hall in a seedy section of the city. Having once lived in Tsarist splendor, Sofia fled the Bolshevik Revolution with her late husband's aristocratic mother, Olga (Lynn Redgrave), sister, Greshenka (Madeleine Potter), and Aunt Sara (Vanessa Redgrave) and Uncle Peter (John Wood). Reduced to working as a taxi dancer in order to feed her relatives and 10-year-old daughter (Madeleine Daly), Sofia must not only endure the groping hands of strange men but the contempt of Olga, who openly despises Sofia for the shame she's brought to this once-proud family — though she isn't too proud to take the cash Sofia brings home. After Jackson bets what money he has on a winning horse, he's able to make his perfect club a reality, and within a year Sofia is installed in the chicly decadent cabaret appropriately named The White Countess. Here, safe behind the heavy doors of his own club, Jackson has re-created a world he can control; Sofia's promise never to share personal details further ensures that his heart also remains safe. But no doors are solid enough to keep the Japanese at bay, and no heart is hard enough to resist the onslaught of compassion. Ivory's last-minute decision to render his hero sightless may make certain symbolic sense, but it creates an even greater distance between Jackson and the woman he must inevitably come to love; their dull self-restraint makes THE REMAINS OF THE DAY look like soft-core porn. Sadly, Merchant died in 2005, leaving this artificial and misconceived love story as a final but unfit testament to a far more distinguished career. leave a comment --Ken Fox
Are You Watching?
The White Countess
Loading ...
Advertisement

Our Partners

Advertisement

Related Websites

You might be also interested in the following websites:

Most Popular TV Shows

  1. American Idol
  2. NCIS
  3. Big Bang Theory
  4. Voice
  5. Person of Interest
more popular tv shows

Most Popular Celebrities

  1. Jessica Simpson
  2. Khloe Kardashian
  3. Kate Middleton
  4. Maria Menounos
  5. Kim Kardashian
more popular celebrities

Most Popular Movies

  1. Avengers
  2. Battleship
  3. The Dictator
  4. Dark Shadows
  5. What To Expect When You're Expecting
more popular movies

Top Videos

  1. Revenge
  2. The Big Bang Theory
  3. Modern Family
  4. Young and the Restless
  5. Days of our Lives
more top videos