The White Countess
| The White Countess | |
|---|---|
Original poster
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| Directed by | James Ivory |
| Produced by | Ismail Merchant |
| Written by | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| Starring |
Ralph Fiennes Natasha Richardson Vanessa Redgrave Hiroyuki Sanada Lynn Redgrave Allan Corduner Madeleine Potter |
| Music by | Richard Robbins |
| Cinematography | Christopher Doyle |
| Edited by | John David Allen |
| Distributed by | Sony Pictures Classics |
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Release date
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December 21, 2005 |
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Running time
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135 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom United States China |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $4,092,682 (worldwide) |
The White Countess is a 2005 drama film directed by James Ivory. The screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro focuses on a disparate group of displaced persons attempting to survive in Shanghai in the late 1930s.
Having escaped the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Countess Sofia Belinskaya is working as a taxi dancer in a seedy Shanghai bar to support her family of White émigrés, including her daughter Katya, her mother-in-law Olga, her sister-in-law Grushenka, and an aunt and uncle by marriage, Princess Vera and Prince Peter. Despite the fact employment is scarce and her meagre income is the family's only source of revenue, Sofia's once-aristocratic relatives scorn her for her choice of profession and insist she keep it a secret from her child.
Sofia eventually meets Todd Jackson, a former official of the U.S. State Department who recently lost his wife and children in separate terrorist bombings. The bombing that killed his child also left him blind. Using his substantial winnings from a well-placed bet at the racetrack, he opens an elegant nightclub catering to the cosmopolitan upper class and invites Sofia to work for him as his primary hostess, an offer she accepts, and in honor of her he calls the club "The White Countess." As time passes, the two begin to fall in love, but neither acts on their feelings until the political climate around them slowly disintegrates, leading to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War and a mass exodus from the besieged city.
In The Making of The White Countess, a bonus feature on the DVD release of the film, production designer Andrew Sanders discusses the difficulties he had recreating 1930s Shanghai in a city where most pre-war remnants are surrounded by modern skyscrapers and neon lights. Many of the sets had to be constructed on soundstages. Also impeding him were restrictions on imports levied by the Chinese government, forcing him to make do with whatever materials he could find within the country.
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Wikipedia