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THE PAINTED VEIL. Dir John Curran. 2006

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This is a remake of a 1934 classic starring Greta Garbo and is based on a novel by Somerset Maugham. Kitty is a bored, rather empty, piano playing socialite with an overbearing mother who wants her to get married because that’s what girls do (it's set in the 1920s). Kitty likes dancing, playing tennis, and has never been in love. Along comes a rather serious but unexciting bacteriologist to woo her; Kitty accepts his proposal, and they leave for Shanghai. Kitty has escaped from her mother only to succumb to a deeper boredom amongst the colonial set.

She embarks on a passionate affair with a diplomat, is discovered, and she becomes victim to the intensity of her husband’s feelings of rejection, pain and anger at her infidelity. His punishment is to take her into rural China where there is a severe cholera outbreak.

It is a study of repressed emotion and correct behaviour, and it makes horribly uncomfortable viewing with its sense of being trapped in a loveless marriage, and worse, a vindictive marriage. It is a story about revenge, forgiveness, isolation and the simple need for love.

Visually gorgeous, with steep, pointed mountains and languid rivers, there is a sense of humidity and oppressive heat; the audience is transported into another world and another time. I love the feminine shoes and dresses made in soft linen and cotton lawn. Having grown up watching films from the 1940s, films made overseas hold an enticing glamour for me. It is exotic travel, social history, heat and strangeness. It is eco-tourism at its most efficient. We don’t need to fly there.
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