THE PAINTED VEIL and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
The Painted Veil (2006), dir John Curran, starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Diana Rigg and Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), dir Mike Newell, starring Javier Bardem
The Painted Veil, adapted from a Somerset Maugham novel, is a moving tale of a love affair played out before the backdrop of a cholera epidemic in China sometime in the early 20th century. The film depicts the horrors of cholera, the beauty of the Chinese landscape, the trials and tribulations of Walter and Kitty Fane’s relationship. Love in the Time of Cholera, (another adaptation from the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, adapted by Ronald Harwood) shares with The Painted Veil the theme of Europeans in a non-European locale, coping, or failing to cope, with cholera.
In The Painted Veil, Walter Fane (played by Edward Norton, an American actor with a high art reputation), a British medical official sent to a remote Chinese Province to help control a cholera epidemic is estranged from his wife Kitty, who has been having an affair. Walter decides that it is best to bring Kitty with him into the midst of the epidemic, blackmailing her into doing so with the threat of divorce. This film is about the relationship between Walter and Kitty as they overcome their estrangement. The Chinese landscape is stunning, the reconstruction of the cholera epidemic entirely convincing, also genuinely horrifying. As Walter and Kitty begin to find themselves in this crisis, the division between them is healed, just as Walter begins to find solutions and cures for the epidemic. The depiction of Walter and Kitty Fane's relationship is genuinely involving and moving. Kitty becomes pregnant, Walter dies. When Kitty returns to London she meets her former lover in the street but refuses to meet him again and has clearly found that her love for Walter still endures.
The performances by Watts and Norton are very fine, the only drawback being Norton's European accent which he previously tried out in the role of Eisenheim in a film reviewed in these columns, The Illusionist. His accent is affected, pretentious, wrong, because it isn’t English, German or French but just an attempt at something generically European.
In contrast, Love in the Time of Cholera never has the consistency of tone, the seriousness that makes The Painted Veil such a triumph, but it can also be said to be unpretentious, rollicking fun. The opening of Love in the Time of Cholera is enjoyable, its obvious that the filmic style is much bolder, brighter, happier, more colourful, rounds not squares, fundamentally more Spanish than The Painted Veil. This film will be enjoyed by anyone who has spent a lot of time living in the Spanish-speaking world, enjoying the quality of the light, open planes of blue, sunlight that squeezes the eye like lemon juice, who likes the easygoing temperament that some people enjoy in hot climes. But this film is not a successful adaptation of the novel. It’s hard to see what the director Mike Newell was aiming at. It fundamentally lacks the emotional punch, the complexity of the magical realism that made the novel so rich and successful. I came away unmoved, not really caring very much about any of the characters in the film.
Paul Murphy, Riverside Studios, London
The Painted Veil, adapted from a Somerset Maugham novel, is a moving tale of a love affair played out before the backdrop of a cholera epidemic in China sometime in the early 20th century. The film depicts the horrors of cholera, the beauty of the Chinese landscape, the trials and tribulations of Walter and Kitty Fane’s relationship. Love in the Time of Cholera, (another adaptation from the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, adapted by Ronald Harwood) shares with The Painted Veil the theme of Europeans in a non-European locale, coping, or failing to cope, with cholera.
In The Painted Veil, Walter Fane (played by Edward Norton, an American actor with a high art reputation), a British medical official sent to a remote Chinese Province to help control a cholera epidemic is estranged from his wife Kitty, who has been having an affair. Walter decides that it is best to bring Kitty with him into the midst of the epidemic, blackmailing her into doing so with the threat of divorce. This film is about the relationship between Walter and Kitty as they overcome their estrangement. The Chinese landscape is stunning, the reconstruction of the cholera epidemic entirely convincing, also genuinely horrifying. As Walter and Kitty begin to find themselves in this crisis, the division between them is healed, just as Walter begins to find solutions and cures for the epidemic. The depiction of Walter and Kitty Fane's relationship is genuinely involving and moving. Kitty becomes pregnant, Walter dies. When Kitty returns to London she meets her former lover in the street but refuses to meet him again and has clearly found that her love for Walter still endures.
The performances by Watts and Norton are very fine, the only drawback being Norton's European accent which he previously tried out in the role of Eisenheim in a film reviewed in these columns, The Illusionist. His accent is affected, pretentious, wrong, because it isn’t English, German or French but just an attempt at something generically European.
In contrast, Love in the Time of Cholera never has the consistency of tone, the seriousness that makes The Painted Veil such a triumph, but it can also be said to be unpretentious, rollicking fun. The opening of Love in the Time of Cholera is enjoyable, its obvious that the filmic style is much bolder, brighter, happier, more colourful, rounds not squares, fundamentally more Spanish than The Painted Veil. This film will be enjoyed by anyone who has spent a lot of time living in the Spanish-speaking world, enjoying the quality of the light, open planes of blue, sunlight that squeezes the eye like lemon juice, who likes the easygoing temperament that some people enjoy in hot climes. But this film is not a successful adaptation of the novel. It’s hard to see what the director Mike Newell was aiming at. It fundamentally lacks the emotional punch, the complexity of the magical realism that made the novel so rich and successful. I came away unmoved, not really caring very much about any of the characters in the film.
Paul Murphy, Riverside Studios, London
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