The White Countess

The White Countess is a 2005 drama film directed by James Ivory. The screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro focuses on a disparate group of displaced persons attempting to survive in Shanghai in the late 1930s.

Plot

Having escaped the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Countess Sofia Belinskaya is working as a taxi dancer in a seedy Shanghai bar to support her family of White émigrés, including her daughter Katya, her mother-in-law Olga, her sister-in-law Grushenka, and an aunt and uncle by marriage, Princess Vera and Prince Peter. Despite the fact employment is scarce and her meagre income is the family's only source of revenue, Sofia's once-aristocratic relatives scorn her for her choice of profession and insist she keep it a secret from her child.
Sofia eventually meets Todd Jackson, a former official of the US State Department who recently lost his wife and daughter in separate terrorist bombings. The bombing that killed his child also left him blind. Using his substantial winnings from a well-placed bet at the racetrack, he opens an elegant nightclub catering to the cosmopolitan upper class and invites Sofia to work for him as his primary hostess, an offer she accepts, and in honour of her he calls the club The White Countess. As time passes, the two begin to fall in love, but neither acts on their feelings until the political climate around them slowly disintegrates during the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War and a mass exodus from the besieged city.