Movies
Throughout its grand history the colonial film has exploited
the violence associated with the imperial adventure, the clash between
Europeans and — take your pick — Africans, Indians, Asians, Pacific
Islanders. When set in the 19th century, the great age of imperialism, it
usually concentrates on the heroic actions of British (and occasionally
American) fighting men in distant lands, which makes for exciting cinema — Beau Geste, Four Feathers, Gunga Din,
King of the Khyber Rifles, Zulu, 55 Days of Peking, The Sand
Pebbles, and scores of others. At the same time, those films also dramatize
the romance of foreign places and customs, the seduction of the visitor by the
beauty and strangeness of another people, another land.
When they deal with the 20th century colonial experience,
however, the films analyze more seriously the cultural distances between two
civilizations and suggest something like a reversal of roles, the subsequent
instruction of the allegedly sophisticated conqueror by the allegedly primitive
native people, often against a background of obscure peril. The high adventure
of battle and conquest becomes an inward struggle, an interior journey, the
exploration of a different sort of uncharted territory, the tangled wilderness
of the human heart.
In The Painted Veil,
several familiar themes of colonial fiction and film combine to show the impact
of the experience on an immature, self-absorbed young woman in a foreign land
at a time of turmoil and danger. The picture opens in 1925, with a sequence
showing the tedious and painful journey of an English couple, Dr. Walter Fane
(Edward Norton) and his wife, Kitty (Naomi Watts), to a remote village in
inland China,
far from any of the amenities enjoyed by the privileged Brit abroad.
A series of flashbacks establishes the shaky basis for the
hasty, unwise marriage of the government bacteriologist and the spoiled
socialite, and Kitty’s subsequent boredom and loneliness in Shanghai. When Walter discovers her affair
with a British diplomat (Liev Schreiber), he punishes her by forcing her to
accompany him when he volunteers to help in a cholera epidemic. Compounding her
unhappiness, Walter’s risky undertaking threatens both their lives — from the
disease, from the predatory warlords, from a populace resentful of foreigners,
even when they arrive with the naive intention of doing good.
As Walter works with a Chinese doctor tending to the sick
and attempting to find the source of the disease, Kitty simmers with
resentment; their relationship devolves into a barely tolerable state of mutual
hostility. Virtually on a whim, Kitty finally finds a way to make herself useful, helping the nuns in a French convent to work
with Chinese orphans, an experience that expands her understanding of the
people, her situation, and her husband. When the mother superior (Diana Rigg)
speaks to her of duty, faith, and service, she also learns something of the
meaning of grace, which ultimately transforms both her spirit and her marriage.
Though the movie tends to sentimentalize and simplify the
love story that essentially empowers its plot, it provides some satisfying
sequences and images worthy of its grand tradition. Walter’s discovery of a
method to combat the deadly disease follows a pattern that reaches all the way
back to Kipling’s fascination with the engineers and technicians who built the
railroads and bridges that crossed the Indian subcontinent; the obscure heroism
of his medical work further recalls Conrad’s novels about the imperial endeavor
in Africa and the Far East.
In addition to the generally controlled and understated
performances of Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, who speak with convincing
English accents, an actor named Toby Jones conveys perfectly the character of a
local representative of the British government named Waddington, a perfectly
decent fellow gone entirely to seed in the great tradition, succumbing to the
temptations and corruptions of an exotic land. Despite the quality of the
acting and the pat predictability of much of the script, The Painted Veil works most eloquently in its beautiful silences.
It returns again and again to shots of Norton and Watts traversing a river from
their squalid house to the village full of the sick and dying, showing the
lush, angular hills and the flowing water with the delicacy and precision of an
Oriental painting, capturing in that midpoint the ambiguous emotional essence
of the colonial experience.
The Painted Veil (PG-13), directed by John Curran, is now
playing at Little Theatres and Pittsford Cinema.
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2007.
