everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

The White Countess is about Russian princesses, Jewish refugees and a blind American escaping from Shanghai. This tedious wreck of a movie failed at every hurdle except the props and the photography. The Redgraves were lustreless and Ralph Fiennes was no better than a good amateur. Ho hum, two stars for effort. Cannot believe the script - spark free, dull, characterless, tedious, humourless - was by Kazuo Ishiguro. And why use Fiennes as an American when he cannot speak in a convincing American accent? Fiennes can be good when he is strongly directed. Grand Budapest Hotel revealed him in good form. But this was as bad as he can be and that means very poor indeed. Self indulgent, simpering, and shallow. An hour too long; a fractured unfocused narrative; this is the nadir of the Merchant Ivory we love, probably because there is no Merchant in it.

With an international cast and much of the movie actually set on location, "The White Countess" seems to have most of the design needed to bring out pre-WWII era China, but the director, Ivory, may be a bit too ambitious. The sets and styles seem often too set-like for their own good, and draw attention to themselves - extras seemed like extras, costumes like costumes, explosions more like fireworks and so on and so forth. Understandably the main character Jackson's in sort of a malaise, but the movie plods along despite it's in your face character development. There seemed to be little chemistry between actors Fiennes and Richardson as well. The acting and dialog is well enough though - the movie needs a little more going for it than bar-scene after bar-scene and murky political dialog. It's a near miss for me.

This is one of the very few films i have ever seen in my life where i was forced to give up, concede how bored i was, and just TURN IT OFF. The opening credits are beautifully tantalising and gave me much hope but that was cut short pretty quickly. The Redgraves as Russians are laughable, the story is ultimately banal and the writing is lacklustre. The Remains of The Day was an exceptional film but this is just trying too hard to be something it hasn't a hope in hell of achieving. Ralph Fiennes is dreadful and both Fiennes & Richardson are equally unattractive in their conventionality. Yeuch. The film desperately wants to be Casablanca or something with deep poetry in its veins and fails miserably. Really awful.

POSSIBLE SPOILERSLike most Merchant-Ivory films, "The White Countess" is set in an exotic location (in this case Shanghai in the mid-1930's on the verge of the Japanese invasion), and it proceeds at a leisurely pace. Again, like most Merchant-Ivory films, it has an excellent cast: Ralph Fiennes as a blind American ex-diplomat, Natasha Richardson as the title character, and Lynn Redgrave and Vanessa Redgrave as members of her Russian émigré family who are ashamed of the fact that she is earning money (which they are glad enough to accept) as a "dance hall girl" and presumed prostitute. The problem here is that the leisurely pace slows to a crawl and the events leading up to the Japanese takeover are observed at a distance through the interaction of Fiennes with a Japanese diplomat/spy/advance man played by Hiroyuki Sanada. Fiennes has opened his own bar/gathering place with race track winnings and named it The White Countess after the hostess he has hired away from another establishment. Sanada's character -- Matsuda -- helps Fiennes create the political tension that he considers necessary for his place to be successful. Although they are the principals, neither Fiennes nor Richardson distinguish themselves particularly, and Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave are strictly secondary characters. Sanada is, in my opinion, the most successful actor in the entire movie. That's another way of saying that the main story is utterly unconvincing and the principal actors seem merely to have gone through the motions. Neither Fiennes nor Richardson made me care about what is happening to their characters. The Japanese enter the city, the émigrés flee to an undetermined fate. Perhaps the book was more engrossing.