The Painted Veil

(M) Edward Norton, Naomi Watts

The Mother Superior of the order that runs the Chinese orphanage (Diana Rigg) in Mei-tan-fu looks straight into the heart of Kitty (Naomi Watts) when she says, “When love and duty are one, then grace is within you.”

Up until then, Kitty has struggled with her marriage to Walter Fane (Edward Norton), a bacteriologist who has vengefully forced her to go with him to this remote village in the grip of a cholera outbreak which he is working tirelessly to fight.

Wrenched from Shanghai and from the arms of her lover, British Vice Consul Charlie Townsend, Kitty is befriended by a neighbour, Deputy Commissioner Waddington (Toby Jones). She ventures outside of the compound into Mei-tan-fu and is shocked by the suffering she sees.

The tumult in Walter and Kitty’s relationship is mirrored in what’s shown of the British imperial presence in 1920s China.

A massacre of Chinese demonstrators in Shanghai by British troops means mistrust is rife and foreign hatred has reached a peak, the bitter fruit of one culture trying to shape another in its own image.

Likewise, on the domestic front, the icy warfare that has characterised Edward and Kitty’s relationship almost results in fission. However, circumstances force them to realise that each has married who they thought the other was and not who they actually were or are.

Norton and Watts do a tough job well, their brittle characters melting step-by-painful-step to create a believable emotional arc. The Chinese landscape plays a beautiful and profound part in creating emotional impact as does the evocative soundtrack which deservedly won a Golden Globe in 2007.

The film is based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham; the title is from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet which begins, “Lift not the painted veil which those who live/Call Life.”

More than a costume drama, this powerful movie does lift a veil on how unwieldy love is, how vengeful humans can be and yet how relationships mature and reconciliation blossoms when vision is based on complex truths and not self-determined, self-deluding fiction.

Marjorie Lewis-Jones