Chinese Whispers

Sunday Herald, Seven Days, 26 March 2006

For foreign women seeking refuge in 1920s and 30s Shanghai, survival meant selling themselves, writes Fraser Newham

BACK IN the 1930s they may have called Shanghai 'the Paris of the East', but nobody was talking about fashion. It was more to do with a certain brand of joie de vivre - in particular, the city's notorious nightlife, its casinos and cabaret bars. "The cabarets are in three classifications," notes a popular English-language guidebook of the time. "High class, low class and no class. You take your choice."
It's a surprising setting for the latest Merchant Ivory period drama , The White Countess, coming from a production house associated with the starched goings-on of the English upper classes, whether at home in the manor house or on location in the Raj. Starring Natasha Richardson and Ralph Fiennes, the film tells the story of a blind American diplomat and a one-time aristocratic Russian refugee, tracing their developing relationship in the nightclubs and bars of a still-swinging city as it braces itself for imminent Japanese assault.

Released this Friday, the film is already guaranteed its place in movie history. It was the last project completed by the directing/producing creative partnership of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory before Merchant's death in May last year.

Even while filming in Shanghai, Merchant suffered a nasty fall and received treatment in a Chinese hospital . He appeared at the film's wrap party in a wheelchair; a poignant image, though the fall was unconnected to his death in London three months later.

The screenplay comes courtesy of another name familiar to fans of period drama, Booker-prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro -and the venture marks a welcome return for the British-raised Japanese author to old Shanghai, the setting for his 2000 novel When We Were Orphans and a time and place with which he has family connections. "My grandfather had been charged with the task of establishing Toyota in China, at the time still a textile company," says Ishiguro. "He lived as part of Shanghai's community of expat businessmen in the International Settlement, near Bubbling Well Road."

His father was born in Shanghai, spending in the city the first 17 years of an international life that would later see him move his young family to the UK. The author seems attracted to iconic settings. The Remains Of The Day, itself the subject of an Oscar-winning Merchant Ivory adaptation, played with readers' expectations of the English stately home. Here he addresses the icon that is old Shanghai, a city whose very name whispers every kind of decadence and sin.

The central character, Jackson (Fiennes), is a shell-shocked former diplomat; after losing first his family and then his eyesight in tragic circumstances , Jackson now finds his refuge in the pleasure districts of the East. "We have a central character who has a refined taste for sleazy bars in Shanghai," says Ishiguro . "He is moving around in 1930s Shanghai checking out different bars because he wants just the right blend."

Ultimately, Jackson opens his own bar: The White Countess of the title. With a connoisseur's understanding of detail he attempts to create the perfect combination of glamour, danger and sleaze. He meets Sofia (played by Natasha Richardson), one of the many high-born White Russian refugees who fled the Bolshevik Red Army in 1921. A taxi-dancer - that is, a professional dance partner - Sofia is doing whatever she must to survive in Shanghai. Beguiled by her sad story and delicate charm, Jackson selects the former countess to work as his leading hostess...

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