The White Countess

Herald rating: * * *

The final collaboration between the producer-director duo Ismail Merchant and James Ivory (the former died last year) is far from the peaks of Room With A View, A Passage To India and The Remains of the Day.

It features the standard impeccable design and set dressing (although the climactic fall of Shanghai is quaintly minimal) and the ravishing photography of Christopher Doyle.

But the script - by Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote the marvellous source novel for Remains - is a rambling and stilted affair and, fatally, never manages to generate any sort of emotional jolt.

This tests the considerable skills of the three Redgraves in the cast (Richardson and her aunt and mother, Lynn and Vanessa respectively) and of Fiennes, so determined to underplay his character's blindness and sounding so like Jimmy Stewart that he's hard to take seriously.

The setting is Shanghai in the mid-30s, before the Japanese invasion. Sofia (Richardson) is the most beautiful of a family of aristocratic Russian exiles, all of whom frown at her job as a nightclub taxi dancer despite depending on it for their collective income.

Fiennes is a widowed and burnt-out American diplomat, blinded in tragic circumstances, who falls for what he "sees" in Sofia and establishes her as the centrepiece in his nightclub.

The problem is that the heat between them never rises above lukewarm. Apart from a spellbinding final sequence (junks in full sail on the East China Sea), it's a handsome but inert period piece.

CAST: Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave
DIRECTOR: James Ivory
RUNNING TIME: 135 minutes
RATING: M, contains medium-level violence
SCREENING: Lido, Bridgeway