This is a love story – backwards, but a love story none-the-less. Instead of a passion that grows and then atrophies, this story follows a dead relationship on its road to vitality and a wondrous respect.
I wasn’t quite sure why I liked “The Painted Veil”(2006). Did I fall into it so easily because of watching so much of PBS’ Masterpiece Theater “Upstairs, Downstairs”/ “Britain between the Wars” -like offerings?
Nah. I liked it because it did what I want movies to do – tell me a story, take me to time and place and make me care about how it all ends.
Beautifully filmed, this adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story takes place during the 1920s in the middle of a cholera epidemic in a small, beautiful, lush village in China.
The green of the countryside covers the spreading disease just as the British Edwardian façade of manners covers the sham of a marriage.
The English doctor and his wife drop into the middle of the ugliness of sickness and the unease of the rising Chinese nationalist fervor and as they adapt and deal with challenges, they discover and accept one another for who they are – not who they should be, wish to be, hope to be – but the reality of who they are.
And they both turn out to be much bigger than the other thought – both are truly worthy, different, but worthy. Acceptance. Love.
The actors were lovely – Naomi Watts and Edward Norton are wonderful as the husband & wife. Liev Schreiber plays the dashing fly in the ointment – the wife’s former lover. And all were tightly directed by John J. Curran.
“The Painted Veil” – good love story.