The Painted Veil

Filmed on location in Beijing, Guangxi and Shanghai, this film is undeniably beautiful; the cinematography is breathtaking. The camera glides over the scenery as if it is a brush in the hands of a true artist painting a masterpiece. I am sad to report then that I was left feeling as though I had watched a damp squib rather than a firecracker of a movie. It kept on promising so much and then snatching that promise away.

The story focuses on Kitty (Naomi Watts) and Walter Fane (Edward Norton) who marry because she wants to get away from her domineering mother and because he needs a wife. He works as a bacteriologist in Shanghai and takes her back there with him. On finding out that Kitty is having an affair with an attaché called Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber) he gives her an ultimatum, either she accompanies him into the country to a community rife with cholera or her lover will be exposed. Walter knows full well that Townsend will not risk his career for Kitty and that she will have no alternative but to accompany him, which she does. This is the beginning of the transformation of both of them, because the world they are flung into culturally and socially encourages them to change.

It would have been better to have seen Kitty and Walter’s courtship and his sexual clumsiness with her and then moved seamlessly on to Shanghai and picked up the story from there rather than cutting backward and forward which made for uncomfortable viewing. The only occasion where I felt that the use of this technique was justified was when it dawns on Walter that the cultural and social circumstances of their trip into the hinterlands of China have changed his wife and he reflects back on the spoilt flibbertigibbet he first met.

That is not to say that Norton does not do a fine job of portraying Walter’s constipated, buttoned-up frigidity nor that Watts is anything less than convincing as the wilful, spoilt Kitty - but this is not enough to engage the viewer in their problems. We seem to move from sexual repression and disdain to love and commitment with a trip to the convent! More should have been made of Walter beginning to forgive his wife and she beginning to see his merits.

While the film is visually stunning and the performances are uniformly good, it packs a slightly empty punch.