Beginning in 1963 with The Householder, producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory formed a team that became one of the most stable and reliable brands in the film business. “A Merchant Ivory production” meant quality, usually meant a period film, a literary adaptation, and an easily accessible kind of art movie. The peaks of their achievement, along with The Remains of the Day, are probably their three films based on EM Forster novels, A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End. Pity they didn’t get to A Passage to India before David Lean did.
Often their work should have been called “a Merchant Ivory Prawer Jhabvala production”, because novelist and scriptwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was frequently the third person in this team. Born a German Jew and married to an Indian, she wrote many of their most notable scripts (The Househoulder was based on her novel) and kicked off the Indian connection that brought together the cultivated Californian Ivory and the Indian Merchant.
Merchant died in May this year, so presumably their latest movie, The White Countess, will be the last to bear the Merchant Ivory stamp. Unfortunately, the brand is not exactly going out with a bang. The decline since the peak of the Forster adaptations has been gradual and sometimes barely noticeable, but it is now abundantly clear. Not that The White Countess is a staggeringly bad movie; it’s just not very good. You might say it’s staggeringly mediocre, if the notion of mediocrity didn’t preclude anything so exciting as staggering.
The story revolves around two unfortunates: Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes) and Sofia Belinkshya (Natasha Richardson). Todd is an American, a former diplomat who has suffered a dreadful bereavement in which he also lost his sight. Sofia is a Russian aristocrat brought low by the revolution and exiled into penury in 1930s Shanghai. We’re meant to feel very sorry for both of them and thus, presumably, to sympathise with them, and hope it all comes together for them.
I’m trying to develop a theory of sympathy in the movies — what is it that makes us feel for certain fictional characters, and to invest emotionally in their narratives? Obviously, when a character is blatantly heroic, it’s easy; this appeals to some kind of wish fulfilment. When they are charismatic and good-looking, like the Gael GarcÃa Bernal character in The King, that draws us into sympathy — even if he turns out to be a psychopath. When characters are more ordinary, sometimes placed in an extraordinary situation, what generates sympathy? And is simply feeling sorry for them enough? I, for one, am tired of having to feel sorry for fictional characters.
Clearly I’m still working on my theory. But such thoughts kept going through my head while watching The White Countess — a bad sign in the first place, if a movie allows you too much room to ponder theories.
It starts out promisingly, though. Sofia and her family’s reduced circumstances mean she has to work as a hostess (not a whore) in a Shanghai nightclub. On this income her family depends, but that doesn’t stop them bitching at her and taking a morally disapproving line.
The Russians here are mostly Redgraves: Lynn Redgrave plays Sofia’s mother and her sister, Vanessa (Richardson’s mother in real life), plays her aunt. These veteran actors add some meat to this rather thin broth — Lynn pious and pursed of lip, Vanessa blowsily flamboyant as a one-time pianist now separated forever from any keyboard.
As the movie progressed and we got more involved in Sofia’s and Todd’s issues, I found myself wishing we could go back to the Redgrave Russians and stick with them, despite their accents, which are as thick as month-old borscht. There was surely a riveting Russian émigré family drama to be made, and there are at least another three acting Redgrave/Richardsons who could have been given roles.
Instead, we are meant to concern ourselves with Todd’s dreams of opening a Shanghai nightspot, a classy bar with live entertainment, to be hosted or hostessed by Sofia, the white countess of the title. (“White” means simply czarist, the opposite of “red” or communist, though Sofia is rather pale.) Todd gets this project together, with Sofia’s help and that of a mysterious Japanese man, and all seems to be going well — until the Japanese invade China in 1937.
Until that cataclysmic finale, one does keep wondering if simpering Sofia and sightless Todd are going to get romantic, or if that was just a red herring. The greatest tension so far has been waiting to see if Todd will, in his blindness, trip and fall. Perhaps that’s just a growing desperation, as The White Countess glides by in honeyed visual tones, for some real drama to erupt. When it does, it’s too late, and you’re left wondering if you’re a bad person because you just can’t muster any sympathy.