Producer Ismail Merchant died during the production of The White Countess, thus ending a record-breaking, 44-year partnership with director James Ivory.

From A Room With A View to Howard's End, theirs is a highly distinctive body of work. Indeed, the very term 'Merchant-Ivory' is a guarantee of beautifully staged theatre on a grand scale.

So it is with The White Countess, another period piece focusing on the privileged (or at least once-privileged) and emotionally repressed side of society.

But as Morrissey once sang, "it says nothing to me about my life". And it's as dull as ditchwater.

Russian ex-aristocrat Sofia (Richardson) and American diplomat-turned-businessman Jackson (Fiennes) have both fallen on hard times.

Now widowed and living in a Shanghai tenement with her heartless and ungrateful family, Sofia earns money by dancing and occasionally prostituting herself to strangers in a local club. Jackson's fate was to lose his sight and his family at the same time.

After another night among Shanghai's drinking dens, Jackson is spared a potential mugging by Sofia. Enamoured, he sets about establishing a new club - The White Countess - with her as his 'centrepiece'.

Their relationship is both successful and purely professional. But their deeper feelings come to the surface just as the city is thrown into chaos by the arrival of the Japanese.

Kazuo Ishiguro's adaptation of his own novel The Remains Of The Day was one of Merchant Ivory's greatest successes. So it's hard to believe that the wearying, repetitive dialogue spouted here is the work of a Booker Prize-winner.

"It's what I see... inside my head" says Jackson for the umpteenth time. We get it - he's blind. Now get on with it.

Lumpen narrative aside, Fiennes is, er, fienne albeit in a strangely James Stewart-like performance. Richardson is by turns wooden, wistful and worried. Madeleine Potter is excellent as Sofia's scheming sister-in-law.

Also enjoying a convoluted bit of casting are Richardson's real-life mum and aunt (Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave) as, respectively, Sofia's aunt and mother-in-law.

Merchant would undoubtedly approve, but this represents a disappointingly forgettable swansong to a commendable career.

Elliott Noble