the white countess

Today was my last day of work…. for awhile at least. The English schools have their Easter break, and as a result, so do I. I am not complaining, I badly need the time to catch up my academic work…although the way things are going, it looks like it is going to be a lively break, unlike the serious study-exclusively period I had planned. Not that I am complaining about that either! The last day of the term went well, the Italian students at the school where I work put on an Italian party, with pizza, lasagne, and all the rest. Naturally, being a poor student myself, I took the opportunity to stuff my face, while some of my colleagues looked on in horror. I also managed to consume a box of maltese chocolates, brought to me, along with a lovely box, by my colleague and fellow blogger, Marcus. I had never had this sort of chocolates before I came to England this year, but they are disturbingly addictive.
My temporarily last day of work also happened to conveniently coincide with pay day. As I don’t have much cash this year, I don’t go out and splurge normally on this day, but it had been a long month and I had done overtime at another school….and I couldn’t bring myself to go straight home and hit the books, so I decided to go to the cinema.
I had seen an early review for the White Countess in the guardian a while back, and the film looked intriguing, so I decided to check it out. The film starred Ralph Fiennes, whom I quite liked in the Constant Gardener, and Natasha Richardson, whom I also quite like…in addition to her mother Vanessa Redgrave who must be in her eighties by now. The film was the 47th and last of the Merchant Ivory films, and as it turns out, the last, since Ismail Merchant died last year. To add to all this, the script was written by the author Kazuo Ishiguro and set in Shanghai, one of those places I haven’t been to, but dream of visiting. So it definitely appeared to be a film I couldn’t miss.
I read Ishiguro’s Quand nous étions orphelins (or so the book was called in French, I presume the English is…. When We Were Orphans?). it is also set in Shanghai and contains a lot of the same motifs: displaced Europeans, an ambiguous Japanese figure who befriends the white protagonist, a lost little girl seeking a father figure. The setting and mood of the book appealed to be quite a bit… and yet when I finished reading it, I was left with a sense of disappointment. Something had been missing, but I couldn’t put my figure on it. Maybe it was because I read it in French and it was written in English? I still don’t know. I haven’t forgot the book, and its mood still attracts me…. but. Oddly, the film stuck me the same way, perhaps I just don’t like Ishiguro’s handling of these certain themes… but no I don’t think that is it.
I absolutely loved the photography in the film- the images were really beautiful. The bar in which much of the film takes place is great; I would love to find such a place myself. The clothes, the sets, the street scenes, the interiors, all that was amazing. The film was worth paying for just as a visual experience. As in the book, the mood of the film was really haunting, lost and tragic and bittersweet. Natasha Richardson plays an impoverished Russian countess working in a bar in late 1930s Shanghai. There were many such types (some of my friends grandparents ended up in China after the revolution) and their story is worth telling. Most works on Russian émigrés are set in Paris or Nice, overlooking the fact that place like China and Belgrade were also major destinations of white emigration. Although, as a picky historian, I had a few doubts about the plot: the daughter in the film is about 7 or 8, and her father is alleged to have died leaving Russia. This isn’t possible, the Russian aristocrats got out generally in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, and certainly by the early 1920s, so if the film was set in 1937, as I can only assume from the Japanese onslaught at the end, then the Russian family must have already been in exile for close to 17 years, maybe even 20, so the presence of such a young child is a bit confusing. But this is me being anal. In general, the film was beautiful and evocative of a lost world I am sad I never got to see.
Yet, again I had the feeling that something was missing. Fiennes was totally believable in his role as a blind man, and Richardson’s acting was good too, but the film was slow moving and the plot at times seemed predictably trite. Most of all, I was a bit puzzled by the fake Russian accents all the supposed Russian characters used. It was especially funny since in the film both Vanessa Rengrave and Natasha Richardson speak in French. Richardson’s French is really good, but her mother’s was English school girl like, which sounded funny coming out of the mouth of a supposed Russian princess! The Russian accents were pretty well done, but it took me time to get used to them…. Pity those scenes couldn’t have just been done in Russian. But it wasn’t this that was missing in the film, because what that was I still cant put my finger on.
So instead, on my way home, I popped into my favourite, ultra-cheap book shop and got a 2 pound copy of Ishiguro’s Artist of the Floating World, in English, to see if I can get to the bottom of this feeling of emptiness. Full report to follow!