The Painted Veil

Kitty Garstin starts out as a seemingly empty headed pretty debutante, and through her own vanity sets in motion a series of tragic stages toward self awareness and ultimate peace. She marries eminent bacteriologist Walter Fane to avoid being left on the shelf, and because her unloving mother wants rid of her. Walter is a tribute to Maugham's skill in portraying ambivalence in this academic - a delicate soul, whose true worth is initially masked by gaucherie but finally illuminates the whole story.



This ill-matched pair travel both literally and metaphorically. Walter takes a post in Hong Kong immediately after the marriage, and Kitty begins a reckless infidelity with the caddish Charlie Townsend.

They go through nightmare territory in which cholera, hardship, courage, anger and tragedy are dramatised against the exotic backcloth of rice-fields, temples and a river on which ‘you could discern palely the lines of the crowded junks -. in front it was a shining wall the eye could not pierce’.

A convent teeming with tiny Chinese orphans, together with a saintly mother superior, who acts as a moral chorus, could suggest The Sound of Music if not The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.

Fortunately, Waddington, a dwarf-like philosopher cum drunk, provides an antidote to any such sentimentality with his kindly but piercingly astute observations that underpin his altruism toward the convent, his loyalty and respect for Walter and his determination to steer Kitty toward self-knowledge.

The denouement is generative and Shakespearean with a tragic death, sacrifice, and the birth of a child. In this dramatic tale, good certainly triumphs over evil but not without tragic consequence.

There are convincing performances by Naomi Watts and Edward Norton as the tragic couple, sumptuous landscape photography of China, and Diana Rigg puts in the sort of performance as mother superior which used to be the speciality of Wendy Hillier. It's easy to forget that Somerset Maugham was once a best-selling author. This re-make of his 1925 novel proves why.

© Heather Pollitt 2007         [more FILM reviews]

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