Good movie but grossly overrated

From my favorite movies..

Excellent but underrated film

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

I found this film on the MPLEX Chanel TV listings of Comcast Xfinity. The listing gave it just 2 of 4 stars, but as a history buff I found the description blurb compelling: "Intriguing love story, set in 1936 Shanghai, in which a disillusioned blind diplomat (Ralph Fiennes) falls for a ruined Russian royal (Natasha Richardson) working as a B-girl. Richardson's mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and aunt, Lynn Redgrave, costar."I set my DVR to record it a while back but just got around to watching it I am writing this review to protest the 2-star rating of the listing. Maybe its not 4-star, but it deserves at least 3-star. Richardson's Countess' job is more correctly labeled as a "taxi dancer" in a cabaret-bar, not a "bar girl." But in 1936 it is still a disgraceful job in the minds of her mother, aunt and sister-in-law, who live with her and are supported by her earnings, but still pretend their royal birth entitles them to a better life. This becomes significant late in the film. Fiennes' character has given up any pretense of using his reputation as a top American diplomat for the stodgy respectable company that pays his salary, and dreams of one-day owning a cabaret of his own with just the right amount of tension between internationally diverse clientèle, a select group of bouncers, the right entertainment, and the ideal elegant but sad woman to set the sexual atmosphere. He wants to live in his dream bar and shut out the messy real world outside.

Compared to the Japanese takeover of Shanghai as seen in the earlier film Empire of the Sun, this was something of a low-budget, one-or-two camera, plodding disappointment. Contemporary reviews from 2005 are apt only in terms of words of appreciation for Merchant-Ivory production values and a cast of very good (though not in this film "great") actors. While the script and characters are somewhat compelling, my interest in the story itself waned once the climax seemed foreordained.What disturbed me most, however (and I admit it is more applicable to trivia than to a critique), was the presence in a 1936 or 1937 plot of a 1941 Packard, a 1942 Dodge, and a 1948 Ford. The Packard and the Dodge are perhaps forgivable, but not the Ford.As noted, the 1987 Empire of the Sun had most such details right, even if the characters were insufferable, unlike those of the White Countess.

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.

If there was ever a movie that had all the ingredients for a masterpiece and failed completely, this is the one. Same people who made unforgettable "The Remains of the Day" and " Maurice" and "Howard's End", made this dross. Shanghai in 1936 is a perfect setting for a tale that contains intrigue, romance i tragedy in almost equal measure. Impoverished countess and disillusioned diplomat met and fell in love. Incredible cast, excellent writer and very bad direction of the seasoned veteran James Ivory. Everything looks contrived and fake, there is no magic between two main protagonists, and worst of all there is no sense of doom and tragedy that clouds everybody's lives. The city of lost souls seems empty and soulless.