The Painted Veil

The Painted Veil is a 2006 American drama film directed by John Curran. The screenplay by Ron Nyswaner is based on the 1925 novel of the same title by W. Somerset Maugham. Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Toby Jones, Anthony Wong Chau Sang and Liev Schreiber appear in the leading roles. This is the third film adaptation of the Maugham book, following a 1934 film starring Greta Garbo and Herbert Marshall and a 1957 version called The Seventh Sin with Bill Travers and Eleanor Parker. Plot On a brief trip to London in the early 1920s, earnest and bookish bacteriologist Walter Fane is dazzled by Kitty Garstin, a London socialite. He proposes; she accepts ("only to get as far away from [her] mother as possible"), and the couple have a honeymoon in Venice. They travel to Walter's medical post in Shanghai, where he is stationed in a government lab studying infectious diseases. They are ill-suited, with Kitty much more interested in parties and the social life of the British expatriate community. She meets Charles Townsend, a married British vice consul, and they have an affair. When Walter finds out, he threatens divorce for adultery unless she accompanies him to a village in a remote area of China where he has volunteered to treat victims of an unchecked cholera epidemic. Kitty begs for a quiet divorce, which he initially refuses, but later says only if Townsend will leave his wife Dorothy to marry her. Charles declines to accept, despite earlier claiming his love for Kitty.