A confession: I hate, hate, hate Merchant-Ivory movies.
Probably, I should recuse myself from reviewing them, so much do I
hate them. But now comes what is presumably the last of them —
since Ismail Merchant died in May — and it perfectly embodies
everything I hate about them. This means that those who, unlike me,
love these films, will really love The White
Countess. Or so I imagine. Set in the international city of
Shanghai in the late 1930s, the film adds to its exotic setting and
high-minded message an all-star cast, including a clutch of
Redgraves — Vanessa, her sister Lynn and her daughter Natasha
Richardson — as well as the great Ralph Fiennes and the even
greater John Wood, who is given hardly anything to do. What could
be more appealing to Merchant-Ivory fans — of which I am, most
emphatically, not one.
Did I mention, by the way, that I hate Merchant-Ivory
movies?
One reason for my hatred of them is that these movies are pure
vehicles for emotion, and emoting, in which there is seldom much in
the way of incident or plot. In The White Countess nothing
very much happens until war breaks out in the final reel, and even
the war is only there to get the static characters moving a bit.
The rest of the plot consists of Mr. Fiennes’s character, a
distinguished American diplomat called Todd Jackson, risking his
savings to bet on a horse, thus winning enough money to open his
own “ideal bar” or night club in Shanghai. Then he opens it. Then a
Japanese man called Matsuda (Hiroyuki Sanada ) helps him, at his
request, to add “political tension” to the mix at this ideal bar by
bringing in a few Chinese communists, a few Chinese nationalists,
and a few Japanese “businessmen” like himself, who are really the
advance scouts for a Japanese invasion and takeover.
And, er, that’s about it.
Almost all the rest consists of two strands of emotional
demonstration. The first consists of complaints from the noble
Russian relatives of Miss Richardson, the eponymous Countess, about
how she has disgraced the family by becoming a taxi-dancer in the
dives of Shanghai and the Countess’s saintly endurance of same. The
second consists of Mr. Fiennes, a blind man who, along with his
sight, has lost his wife, his daughter, and his ideals (the latter
articles having been abandoned after his efforts to bring about
world peace through the League of Nations have come to nothing),
looking noble, vulnerable, adorable and pitiable. Now he wants
nothing more than to be proprietor of that perfect bar, the ideal
bar, which he calls The White Countess after its “centerpiece,”
Miss Richardson’s Countess Sophia. To his intuitive sense of such
things, she provides the perfect “balance between the erotic and
the tragic.” Not coincidentally, that is exactly the balance that
Mr. Ivory, who directed from a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, is
trying to create in his film.
Of course he fails. The erotic fizzles out pretty early on and
the tragic is way too self-conscious. Mr. Jackson and the Countess
are nothing like real people; both are merely paragons of noble
suffering and disillusionment. In the end, like all Merchant-Ivory
films, The White Countess ends up being about how awful
our ancestors were — all but a few noble and maverick souls like
Mr. Jackson and the Countess Sophia, that is. And of course the few
members of the genuine and down-to-earth lower orders whom we are
allowed to see. Here they are represented by a host of anonymous
and unspeaking Chinese people and the family of a Jewish refugee
called Samuel Feinstein (Allan Corduner) who lives downstairs from
the Countess’s family. The latter family, in particular, comes in
for quite an authorial trouncing on account of their stifling sense
of respectability and decorum, their obsession with class and
honor, and their contemptible lack of frankness and open-mindedness
about sex. How dare they cling like that to the social and moral
assumptions of their times — assumptions that the enlightened,
like ourselves, have long since understood to be outmoded?
Thus the picture ends with the Countess’s young daughter
(Madeleine Potter) being saved from the dreadful respectability of
her relatives for the way more fun bohemian life of her mother and
that nice Mr. Jackson. Yet the film, also characteristically of
Merchant-Ivory, really lacks the courage of its convictions. The
Countess, is just a taxi-dancer. Though the awful family insists
that “God will punish her” and that “she might as well be on the
streets,” if she ever offers her clients anything more than a dance
we never see it. And when she becomes the “centerpiece” of Mr.
Jackson’s bar, he promises her that she won’t even have to dance —
much. Is it all just a misunderstanding then? And would the
family’s snobbery and prejudice be justified to the picture’s two
I’s — Ivory and Ishiguro — if she really were on the
streets? Somehow I don’t think so. But the authors make their work
easy for themselves by exaggerating the snobbery and prejudice of
the bad just as they exaggerate the nobility and selflessness of
the good.
There is a repeated belaboring of the point about how a young
business associate of Mr. Jackson’s, unlike him, “fails to see what
there is to see” and how, in particular, he can’t see the beauty of
“all this” — meaning the bar. Mr. Jackson is blind, you see, while
the young associate is apparently sighted. Get it? Unfortunately,
the beauty of the bar rather escapes me as well, and nor is there
very much of an attempt on Mr. Ivory’s part to display it. There is
some dancing, some singing, some jazz and some “political tension”
but not much to distinguish the place from any other nightclub so
far as the viewer is concerned. Even the Countess’s duties as
centerpiece seem to involve her in little more than sitting around
and smiling. She is beautiful enough, perhaps, but that doesn’t
make “all this” beautiful too — unless, perhaps, she is seen
through the eyes of a visionary blind man in love.
For it is not giving anything away to note that the tragic blind
man and the tragic Countess are bound to “hook up,” as their
grandchildren might indecorously put it, in the end. As this — the
end — comes nearly two hours and twenty minutes after the
atmospheric but otherwise crashingly uneventful beginning, it’s not
a moment too soon either. Or not unless you like such facile moral
and aesthetic posturings, the stock in trade of the old firm of
Merchant-Ivory, a great deal more than I do.
