Directed by James Ivory. Starring Ralph Fiennes and Natasha Richardson. Rating unavailable. Opens Friday, January 13, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

While one would naturally wish the venerable Merchant-Ivory team well on their final venture together (before the death of Ishmael Merchant), The White Countess provides a less-than-glorious sendoff.

The big-budget picture, which takes place in Shanghai on the eve of the Second World War, manages to come across as even more insular and static than Memoirs of a Geisha, despite the "broader canvas" to which its feeble script repeatedly refers. By the end, there have been 135 minutes of heavy breathing, not even of the heavily aroused sort.

The slow-moving tale centres on Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes, curiously below form), an ex-U.S. diplomat whose accomplishments, like his accent, are only vaguely defined. Circa 1936, he has gone blind and is reduced to drinking his way through board meetings for an unnamed American company while daydreaming about opening his very own nightclub.

This gets closer to fruition after a chance encounter with former aristocrat Sofia Belinsky (Natasha Richardson), a Russian émigrée-white, not red-now reduced to taxi-dancer work to support her daughter and still-imperious relatives (two of whom are played by real-life aunt and mother Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave). The screenplay, from novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Remains of the Day provided the basis for one of the most definitive Merchant-Ivory productions, spends too much time on Sofia's family belittling her and decrying their circumstances, which oddly do not change at all in the jump-cut year since Jackson has opened his establishment.

The place, like the movie, is named after Sofia, his well-remunerated "centrepiece". Perhaps she has promised to save the money and hide her increased status, just as the alleged couple has promised not to discuss their personal histories, except within the confines of carefully arranged flashbacks.

This repressed-romance gambit could effectively fuel a much hotter story, but the lack of on-screen chemistry or narrative drive makes for an entirely flaccid viewing experience. The audience is thus left to focus on more risible elements, especially those involving a suave Japanese man of mystery (Ring man Hiroyuki Sanada) and a Tevye-like Jewish tinker (Allan Corduner) from the old country-both of whom appear content to put aside their own concerns, in the manner of negro servants in old Hollywood movies, to advance the emotional affairs of disheartened white people.

This may sound dishy, in a Casablanca sort of way, but a prewar story during which you are increasingly praying for the Japanese to invade (it happens at about the two-hour mark) does not exactly a satisfying epic make. Fortunately, Room With a View is still readily available on tape or disc.