The Painted Veil feels like the kind of film that just doesn’t get made anymore. And maybe they never did make movies exactly like this, but the lavishness, the care that’s obviously gone into every facet, the sheer detail in the production and direction and most of all in the acting seem like qualities that are pretty rare these days. It’s evident right from the opening credits, a shifting collage of images that only have meaning much later, and are overlaid with one of the most poignant and downright beautiful scores in recent memory. And it’s compounded by the first shots, and a sense of grief and poignancy that carries all the way through to the final scenes.
It’s hard to deny that there’s something nostalgic about Curran’s film - it’s an adaptation of a 1920’s-set W. Somerset Maugham novel and in that sense falls broadly under the banner of costume drama. But its tale, of two people forced to change and grow and alter their perceptions of each other by terrible circumstances, feels strangely fresh for all its historical trappings. The two are Kitty, a bored and spoilt socialite, and Walter, the insular, emotionally stunted bacteriologist that she marries to escape from her parents. The couple move to Shanghai with Walter’s work, but Kitty soon cheats on her new husband, and when Walter discovers the infidelity he punishes her by taking an assignment in a remote, epidemic stricken village and insists that she come with him.
What’s so refreshing is that The Painted Veil rarely falls back on the clichés that have come to dominate most films set around the early half of the last century - the insistent pointing out of how differently everyone behaved, how much better or worse, of the restrictiveness of social customs and particularly of women’s roles. While all of this is present to a degree, it’s never used as a crutch to shore up the plot in place of proper character motivation or plot development. Both Kitty and Walter, and all of the other characters for that matter, behave like real people, and for the most part in a manner that would make sense if it was transplanted into any other time and place in the last century. If they do fall back on social convention, (as, for example, Kitty’s lover does when he realises that their affair has been discovered), it’s always because the character rather than the script is resorting to easy excuses.
It’s telling that the two leads were also both involved with the production - Naomi Watts as Kitty and Edward Norton as Walter have obviously put a huge amount of work into inhabiting their parts. The film would have crumbled without good actors in the central roles because in many scenes the dialogue is pared down and the narrative is told almost entirely through gestures and glances. Added to that, both are immensely complex characters that change drastically over the course of two hours. But Norton gives his best performance in a while, and Watts perhaps her best ever, and both make the absolute most of Ron Nyswaner’s sparse, witty, eloquent script.
The Painted Veil feels in every way like a labour of love, and perhaps the reason for that nostalgic feeling is that labours of love rarely get made on such a grand scale any more, or if they do then rarely with such attention to detail. It’s a small story told on a big canvas, but it doesn’t sacrifice one for the other. The photography of the Chinese landscape is epic and gorgeous, Alexandre Desplat’s score is sweeping, Nyswaner’s script offers a towering backdrop of plague and impending revolution - but none of that gets in the way of the fact that this is basically a film about two people and their relationship to each other.
It’s probably obvious by now that I loved The Painted Veil - In you live in Europe then I can’t recommend enough seeing it in the cinema; if you’re in the US then it’s already available to buy on DVD, as is Desplat’s gorgeous soundtrack.
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