COOL LOVE IN A HOT CLIMATE

REVIEWED - THE WHITE COUNTESS: FOLLOWING: producer Ismail Merchant's death last year, this attractive, if chilly, period romance emerges as the last ever film from the durable Merchant Ivory partnership. The White Countess is not based on a novel by Henry James. EM Forster had no hand in its making either. But, in most other respects, the picture works as a satisfactory valediction for the most reliably middlebrow creative entity in modern cinema. It is tasteful, elegant and you can take any prim maiden aunt to it confident in the knowledge that, though she may snooze, she will not swoon.

The script by Kazuo Ishiguro (whose novel The Remains of the Day spawned one of Merchant Ivory's biggest hits) may, indeed, be an original work, but its characters could conceivably have been culled from some lost Graham Greene story. The setting is sweaty, politely decadent Shanghai in the 1930s. Ralph Fiennes turns up as Todd, a blind American, formerly a diplomat, who, troubled by an awful tragedy later revealed in flashback, now wearily makes his living as a businessman.

Early on Todd encounters Sofia, an aristocratic Russian played by a frostily graceful Natasha Richardson, who is forced to work as a nightclub hostess to support her snobbish, largely ungrateful extended family. Todd decides to construct the perfect bar called The White Countess and, after assuring Sofia that nothing improper will be asked of her, employs the pale emigre as its most prominent ornament. As the Japanese army approaches, Todd and Sofia find themselves falling in love.

The leads are, perhaps, a little too eager to conceal their feelings behind civilised carapaces. Having seen Ralph and Natasha's faces pressed together on the poster, we know their characters will come to look upon one another favourably. Little other evidence of their surging emotions is leaked out before the picture's epic final act drifts into Doctor Zhivago territory.

The White Countess may be slow to ignite, but its smoky ambience is pulled off with such assurance that it rarely seems boring. Much of the credit should go to Christopher Doyle, the Australian-born cinematographer of Wong Kar-Wai's great films, whose taste for unlikely camera angles and oily monochrome lighting injects real juice into proceedings.

Sadly, the film's other prime selling point - the bringing together of three members of the Redgrave clan - ends up looking a little like a stunt. Huddling together in drab olive misery while Natasha flashes about in scarlet, Vanessa and Lynne Redgrave, Richardson's mother and aunt, have little else to do but scowl malevolently. The three theatrical dynasts do, it is true, look nicely similar. But, hang on, isn't Lynne playing Sofia's mother-in-law? Very discombobulating.