The Painted Veil

China, United States, Canada

2006

125 Min

Color

2.40:1

English, Mandarin, French

Currently 3.4/5 Stars.
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PROD Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Sara Colleton, Jean-François Fonlupt, Bob Yari

SCR Ron Nyswaner, Edward Norton

CAST Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Diana Rigg, Toby Jones, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Gesang Meiduo, Cheng Shihan, Sally Hawkins

Watts steps into the pin-heeled shoes of Greta Garbo, who first played the impish Kitty Fane in 1934. She’s certainly a lot less glamorous than Garbo, but adds a modern ‘Material Girl’ grit to Kitty’s snub-nosed boredom with London life. She marries uptight Walter (Norton) to escape her twittering parents and doesn’t think twice about playing away in Shanghai with fellow ex-pat Charlie (Liev Schreiber). Her reckless streak does nothing to engender Kitty initially, but when Walter spitefully drops her in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, the mood changes. –BBC Film Archive

Director

John Curran

John Curran (born September 11, 1960) is an American film director and screenwriter.

Born in Utica, New York, Curran studied illustration and design at Syracuse University, then worked as an illustrator, graphic designer, and production designer in Manhattan before moving to Sydney, Australia in 1986. There he worked on television commercials before writing and directing the short film Down Rusty Down. For his debut feature film, the 1998 drama Praise, he was nominated for the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Direction and won the Film Critics Circle of Australia Award for Best Director and the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Six years passed before Curran tackled his next project, the independent film We Don’t Live Here Anymore, for which he was nominated for the Grand Special Prize at the Deauville American Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. He followed this two years later with The Painted… read more

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Laura Hilton-Smith

25Feb13

No.26 - An interesting story, Edward Norton is excellent as the menacing husband.

JaimeOBWK

22Feb13

Lovely ♥

Mark Garrett

1Feb13

Curran attacks the film with the size and similarly moving majesty of a ballroom. On its surface, cliché, but underneath and within, a hundred voices whispering in each others ears forming culture, bad partners, shifts in style, and only the appearance of conformity.