Dynamic duo James Ivory and the late Ismail Merchant made their names peddling enlightened exoticism to the moviegoing masses, and The White Countess—their final collaboration—is no different. Stories (usually novels) with a hint of the foreign best suit their ornate shorthand storytelling style, because they benefit from the audience’s interest in unfamiliar exotic details of place, time, or social class. Despite these variables—or, perhaps, because of them—the films in the Merchant-Ivory oeuvre are the epitome of convention, both social and cinematic. For the former they go straight to the masters’ Great Books on the pleasures and perils of social convention, but it’s the latter that makes all of that high culture go down like a sticky sweet spoonful of sugar.

Over the years, Merchant-Ivory Productions has produced films from the books of V.S. Naipaul, Henry James, Anita Desai, E.M. Forster, and Kazuo Ishiguro, most famous for his Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day (adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for the 1993 film). Ishiguro supplied the script for The White Countess, but though it feels freshman, it isn’t technically Ishiguro’s first stab at screenwriting (he wrote the original screenplay for Guy Maddin’s wonderfully bizarre The Saddest Music in the World, but it was apparently rewritten by the director and George Toles). The White Countess is however the first full-length screenplay for which Ishiguro alone takes credit, and this may explain some—though certainly not all—of the film’s failings. Perhaps Ishiguro’s story would work better on the screen had it been adapted by serious screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but what this movie really needs is a strong dose of Guy Maddin’s goofball oddness.

Although supposedly based on a novel by Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki, Ishiguro’s screenplay shares many similarities with his novel When We Were Orphans. In both that novel and this screenplay, action takes place in the “international settlement” quarter of Shanghai that was practically an independent city-state in the Thirties, before the Communist takeover that expelled foreigners, and both the novel and the film are earnest valentines to inter-war cosmopolitanism. In both stories, the main characters flirt with seedy nightclub districts filled with taxi dancers, gamblers, thugs and prostitutes, and both main characters experience the traumatic loss of family members in politically motivated crimes committed by unknown Chinese men. In both stories, there is a Japanese friend whose friendship is not as fierce as his nationalism, fathers are unable to fulfill promises to live with daughters when they grow up, multinational corporations steal men’s souls, the female leads dream of fleeing to Macao, and former Russian aristocrats are reduced to menial jobs in the mean streets of capitalist Shanghai. Unfortunately for The White Countess, When We Were Orphans is a dreadful novel from which the film seems to have inherited many of its worst attributes: imperial nostalgia, kitschy man-against-the-world suspense, and a tendency to run too long and too aimlessly through events so disconnected that it would be euphemistic to call it plot.

The hero in The White Countess is Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), a blind former diplomat whose only ambition is to build “the bar of his dreams.” This bumbler is supposed to have been the last hope for the League of Nations, but he spends the entirety of the film yammering about how “there is no broader canvas” beyond his if-you-build-it-they-will-come obsession. It doesn’t make any sense, and absolutely no effort is put into making us either understand or care. For the first half of the movie, Jackson insists that politics belong “out there,” beyond the heavy tavern doors—and then all of a sudden he tells his Japanese drinking buddy that he wants to invite politics inside. Without the political element, Jackson complains, his bar is “just a confection”—much like this movie. So the Japanese drinking buddy obliges and invites his hyper-nationalist friends... oops, war’s on! The end.

For his part, Fiennes seems to be channeling the spirit of Jimmy Stewart in his approximation of American English, which, combined with his blindness, makes it seem as though he’s talking to an invisible giant white rabbit named Harvey. The effect is intermittently hysterical, but the yuks are too few and far between. I nearly fell out of my chair during Fiennes’s pantomime bit at the racetrack, where for what seems like minutes he straddles and whips an imaginary horse as it nears an imaginary finish line. Even though the rest of this film is utterly forgettable, that image has been burned onto my brain forever.

The comic possibilities in what is otherwise a dirge of a film betray the fact that it both takes itself entirely too seriously and has no patience for the serious themes that might have saved it. Jackson’s class, nation, and profession could have been emphasized to convey the tragedy of the dual failures of a career devoted to internationalism and a life devoted to cosmopolitanism as he watches the country he served and the city he loves be consumed by a war that he could not prevent. Nope. Instead, this film is the story of the eponymous bar, and it’s a real bummer when the bar has to close.

The goddess of tragedy in The White Countess (the bar as well as the film) is Sofia Belinskaya (Natasha Richardson), a Russian countess who fled the Bolsheviks and now works as a taxi dancer and sometime prostitute in order to support the rest of the high-born Belinskaya family (including Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave). Richardson at least does her best to make her bad Russian accent seem charming; unfortunately, the Redgraves don’t even try. Together they live in a ramshackle flat above the Feinstein family, a bunch of dirty Jews literally covered in hay and wood shavings for the duration of the film—but they have more fun! And besides, they don’t mind anti-Semitism—at least it’s not Bolshevism! No tragedy here!

Jackson meets Sofia at a seedy Shanghai nightclub and is attracted to her because of the inherent tragedy of her situation. As they become acquainted, we discover that Jackson refuses his sad life any tragic dignity, much like this movie. Both Jackson and the film itself prefer to tell a clichéd phoenix-from-the-ashes story that depends upon love for redemption. Accordingly, Jackson provides Sofia’s ticket out, and she makes him okay with blindness. He and she are both hounded by the people around them for their “way of life” (i.e. she’s a whore and he’s a buffoon), until they find each other and live happily ever after. In true Merchant-Ivory tradition, this movie is in love with “exposing” old-fashioned propriety, which in this case is simply a straw man to knock around while we rehabilitate the fascists, imperialists, and tsarists, all gussied up in giddy jazz rhythms.

There are moments when the film seems salvageable: as Japanese bombs rain on Shanghai, Jackson is inert in his bar, looking very like a clown with his hat on the stage and too much rouge on his cheeks. Soon afterwards, there’s a tight close-up on Jackson’s face as he realizes that he’s on the business end of a dozen bayonets, and suddenly—and effectively—we’re confronted with the sensation of blindness, of hearing the chaos of war but being unable to see it. But just when the perspective gets interesting, the camera cuts to a wider shot where we get to see all of the expensive sets and costumes and extras around him, in what can only be a tactic to distract the audience from the fact that this film has nothing to say about blindness or sight. Like one of Jackson’s many flashbacks (how do you film a flashback from a blind man’s point of view?), The White Countess could have been beautiful or tragic but settles for conventional instead.