The Painted Veil
Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil is a love story set in the 1920s that tells the story of a young English couple, Walter (Edward Norton), a middle class doctor and Kitty (Naomi Watts), an upper-class woman, who get married for the wrong reasons and relocate to Shanghai, where she falls in love with someone else. When he uncovers her infidelity, in an act of vengeance, he accepts a job in a remote village in China ravaged by a deadly epidemic, and takes her along. Their journey brings meaning to their relationship and gives them purpose in one of the most remote and beautiful places on earth.Kitty and Walter
What I found most intriguing and poignant about The Painted Veil was the unique and unconventional portrayal of a married couple whose relationship progresses in the opposite direction to the norm (as well as the beautiful and sublime setting that is China - often portrayed in a negative light by the west). Usually you meet, you fall in love, you eventually marry (or maybe you don't - in light of today's context) and have plenty of children, and generally life is good. But in this case, boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl marries boy out of desperation, girl has affair - oh dear, we're on the road to D-Day (or Divorce) - but then boy hates girl, girl slowly loves boy, boy loves girl back. It's complicated, let's say.Set in the 1920s, where the hierarchy of society was stringent (when you couldn't always get away with secret liasons without some vicious gossip or public scandal), Kitty has a torrid affair wit a charming British consul cad, Charlie Townsend. Walter is not an idiot. He eventuallydiscovers Kitty's dirty secret, and she finds herself entangled in a web of manipulation with Walter, set upon by society's "values". Out of insanity, spite, revenge, what have you (who knows what Walter was really thinking?) Walter proposes an unusual and rather callous plan to volunteer at a remote village in south-central China ravaged by cholera, dragging his wife with him.
It seems that this is a reluctant yet determined mutual suicide pact and the road to forgiveness on Walter's part is near impossible, but as they grow to adjust to the foreign landscape and the limited society, they learn to look inwards and find qualities in themselves, and thus each other, that they've never been able to see before. Kitty and Walter eventually find themselves bridging the gap, and there is at last hope for something more, something better, a chance for a future. But the road to reconciliation is not without suffering for both parties - there is sorrow and loss, which makes the love story ever the more poignant and heartwrenching.
What can we discern from it? Kitty learns to appreciate her husband, and is well on the way to respecting him, if not loving him, while Walter's icy feelings toward his wife thaw, his once repressed, passionate love for her rising again into something deeper. Though there is no happy ending for Kitty and Walter, they are able to forgive and forget, which brings so much more meaning and power to their relationship, making The Painted Veil a sad but refreshing romance.