The White Countess

The White Countess is a 2005 drama film directed by James Ivory and starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Hiroyuki Sanada, Lynn Redgrave, Allan Corduner, and Madeleine Potter. The screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro focuses on a disparate group of displaced persons attempting to survive in Shanghai in the late 1930s. Plot Having escaped the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Countess Sofia Belinskaya is working as a taxi dancer, if not worse, in a seedy Shanghai bar in 1936 to support her family of aristocratic White Russian 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. Although employment is scarce and her meagre income is almost the Shanghai Russian family's only income, Sofia's relatives scorn her for her work and insist she keep it a secret from her child. Sofia meets Todd Jackson, a former official of the US State Department who several years earlier lost first his wife and child, then later a daughter in separate terrorist bombings. The bombing that killed his daughter also blinded him. With his job at risk and dreaming of running a nightclub, he gambles his savings on a bet at the racetrack. Winning, he opens an elegant nightclub catering to rich cosmopolites and invites Sofia to be his principal hostess, an offer she accepts; in her honour, he calls the club "The White Countess". Over time, they fall in love, but strive to keep work separate from their personal lives. Both are clearly suffering, and could be of much more help and support for the other. Neither is able to act until prodded by necessity upon the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. This conflict causes the balanced political climate to disintegrate, followed by a mass exodus from the besieged city.