The Painted Veil
I’ve just been watching ‘The Painted Veil’, a 2006 film adaptation of the novel by W. Somerset Maugham. I confess to never having read the book, or indeed anything at all by W. Somerset Maugham, but it was one of my father’s birthday presents and we were humouring him by sitting and watching it with him 
It was actually very good, although not, I think, a film to go to bed on, because it was rather depressing and disturbing.
It tells the story of a very unlikeable and shallow young woman called Kitty, who decides to marry a rather socially inept bacteriologist to appease her parents. This is the 1920s, and he is based in Shanghai, so after the marriage she moves out to China with him. Life there bores her, however, as does he, and fairly soon she is having an affair with a much more attractive gentleman who unhappily is already someone else’s husband. Unbeknownst to Kitty, however, he is actually rather a cad, and when her husband catches them in bed together he feels he has nothing to lose by issuing the following, chilling, ultimatum.
Either she travels with him into central China to a town which is suffering a severe epidemic of cholera, or else he will divorce her for adultery. She pleads with him not to publicly disgrace her, and in the end he relents and agrees he will let her divorce him if her lover also divorces his wife and marries her. The lover, of course, had no such intentions - a fact which the husband knew full well, and before long Kitty is accompanying her husband on a long and arduous journey into the seat of the infection.
The world which awaits her there is very different from 1920s London. Whilst her husband deals with the cholera outbreak, she is left alone with nothing to do. Tensions with the British and the local population mean that she is practically a prisoner in her own home, and when she does venture out it is to witness scenes of death all around her. The doctor at best ignores her, at worst is rude, and in the end she is so bored and frustrated that she begins to help out at the local orphanage, assisting the nuns from the local convent.
This is really her turning point, as she starts to do something slightly worthwhile and becomes a bit more likeable. Her husband thaws out a bit too and they begin, unexpectedly, to fall in love with each other for the first time. When Kitty unexpectedly faints, the viewers’ first thought is that she has succumbed to cholera, but it turns out that she is in fact pregnant. There’s a slight problem in so far as it probably isn’t her husband’s child, but he generously agrees to overlook that and they seem fully reconciled.
All too good to be true, of course. Within no time, he is called away to treat an outbreak in a refugee camp outside the town and soon news is brought to Kitty that he is ill. She sits by his side while he dies a nasty and painful death, which is rather sad and not terribly tastefully done, I must say.
The ending flashes forward five years, showing Kitty back in London with a small boy. She randomly bumps into her former lover on the street - he looks at the boy and must have suspicions that he is the father - but Kitty blows him out and walks on. The End.
Hmm. Initially I hated it because the characters were entirely unlikeable, but halfway through I began to warm up to them a bit, at which point the whole thing just became tragic, because it seemed horribly inevitable that the storyline required the doctor to die. I thought the film was well done though; there were enough nasty shots to convey the full horror of cholera, but not so many as to make me need to leave the room or look away. There were some beautiful views of the Chinese scenery too, and the soundtrack was very atmospheric. I would recommend it, so long as you’re not looking for a laugh.
I spent the whole film trying to work out the origin of the title by the way, and at the end I even temporarily forgot Kitty was pregnant and thought she might become a nun, hence the “veil”. But I googled it just and apparently it comes from Shelley:
Lift Not The Painted Veil Which Those Who Live/Call Life
Tags: china, film, the painted veil