It was a low-key night for all concerned at the Mayfair Curzon tonight, for the premiere of Merchant Ivory's latest drama, The White Countess. Producer Ismail Merchant died during filming last year and the Mayfair Curzon hosted most of Merchant Ivory’s films since 1978 so it was a bittersweet atmosphere, with the film’s cast and crew drinking a quiet glass of the fizzy stuff before heading into the cinema. The film's star, Natasha Richardson, summed up everyone's feelings by commenting, “Ismail was was such a life force that it’s inconceivable that he’s not here."
The first Western film to be entirely shot in China,** The White Countess** is set in Shanghai in the 1930s. Richardson plays a down on her luck Russian woman with an interesting line in jobs to support members of her dead husband's aristocratic family. Trapped in the Casablanca-world of Shanghai, a blind ex-US diplomat (played by Ralph Fiennes), befriends her. Despite its glossy looks, the film had a low £15 million budget which, combined with a lack of contacts in China, conspired to make filming trickier than it might otherwise have been.
It was hard,” says director James Ivory. “When we arrived there we didn’t have the kinds of contacts that you have to have to go to a completely foreign culture like China, but gradually it all sort of fell in place. It was hard going at first, but again that was (Ismail’s) doing. We’d still have been there if he hadn’t been around!” And his air-clearing skills will be missed this evening. “He always knew how to throw a good party, and a premiere should be a good party,” remembers Ivory. “He’d have made lots of noise and made people feel good about themselves.”
Vanessa Redgrave was effortlessly elegant, even while using a crutch due to some recent hip problems, sailing through to the Champagne VIP area like some kind of ultra-glamorous ship. Considering recent tabloid revelations about his private life, Ralph Fiennes was unsurprisingly cagey about talking to the print and radio press, so Empire leaped over the telly crews to catch a word about the story: “It’s not about the period, it’s really about the journey of the human heart, if you like,” he said. “You could say that the essential elements of it just happened to be in Shanghai. There is an attraction though, to be creating another world, and James and Ismail did that superbly.”
The film also stars Lynn Redgrave, who, along with Natasha and Vanessa, makes a little pocket of theatrical dynasty. “I’ve done two plays with them in so I think it was a very clever casting idea of Jim’s to make two families into one family,” commented co-star Madeleine Potter, who also starred in another Merchant Ivory production, The Golden Bowl. “Ismail asked me to do it, and I, basically since I met him, did everything he asked me to do! It was a great script and a pleasure to work with Jim always.” Let's hope Merchant Ivory are celebrated in style this evening.