The Painted Veil

John Curran's and Ron Nyswaner's adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil (2006) is, if you have read the novel, a decidedly bizarre beast.  At a very superficial level, the film remains faithful to most of the novel's plot points, down to recycling some of the dialog.  But taken as a whole, this overtly postcolonial film determinedly resists Maugham's colonial original.  The Painted Veil (1925), narrated in the third person but entirely from Kitty Fane's POV, is a rather uneasy novel: the closest thing to "romance" proves to be a sham; there is no reconciliation between Kitty and her husband; and Kitty's quasi-feminist feelings at the end have to be projected into an uncertain future.  China, meanwhile, remains quite Other, a possible source of exotic enlightenment that is quite explicitly rejected in the novel's conclusion.  Curran's and Nyswaner's version, however, yokes a conventional tragic romance to an attack on British imperialism.  The end result undermines Maugham's social satire and historicizes the novel--leaving us, as I said, with much of the surface plot but little of its actual workings.

In the novel, Maugham tacks Kitty's psychological development to her awareness of Walter's sensibilities.  What he does not do, however, is suggest that the two can overcome their intellectual and emotional differences.  On his deathbed, Walter does not answer Kitty's pleas for forgiveness; his dying words, the final line from Oliver Goldsmith's "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog," recast her adultery, his response, and the ultimate result as low comedy (191).  Moreover, after Walter's death, Kitty has to admit to herself that her mourning is a matter of keeping up appearances, because "after all she didn't love him, she had never loved him" (208).   In fact, Kitty's existence throughout remains entirely loveless, whether with Walter, the nuns, Charlie Townsend, her mother, or her father (whose love she wants to earn at the end).  Her social world runs on politics, not passion. By contrast, in the film, Kitty and Walter slowly find common ground after she begins working in the convent, developing a "true" marriage based in mutual respect and recognition.  After a semi-jocular discussion of why the relationship has failed in the first place (repurposing dialog that features in the novel to an entirely different end) the two spend a semi-debauched evening that ends with a glimpse of their friend Waddington in bed with his Chinese mistress.  That moment of unashamed desire, which rewrites Walter's clandestine discovery that his wife is in bed with Charlie Townsend, sets off Walter's and Kitty's reconciliation.  He even manages to accept the fact that her impending child is quite possibly not his (a subject about which the novel's Walter was nowhere near so sanguine).   Alas, after many shots of the happy couple, Walter dies of cholera, he begging forgiveness of her and vice-versa.  Maugham's pessimistic vision of a mismatched marriage thus gives way to the filmmaker's optimism: love will out, if only it can find a way! Indeed, the film's ending, with Kitty living happily at home with her father, devoted to her little Walter, sentimentalizes the novel's considerably more ambivalent vision of Kitty's likely future.  Philip French's complaint that "for no good reason, Kitty's child has been changed from a daughter to a son," aside from making a factual error (there is only an imagined daughter), misses the point: in the novel, which jettisons romance, Kitty wants to raise a daughter who will not need to marry; in the film, which endorses it, Kitty celebrates her marriage through her son. 

In place of the novel's quasi-feminist social satire, the film offers a critique of empire.  Near the beginning, Charlie Townsend pretends to translate a Chinese opera for Kitty, the better to seduce her; as Charlie cheerfully admits when Kitty calls him on it, he doesn't know a single word of Chinese.  Some time later, the film reverses this scene during Walter's first encounter with Colonel Yu: believing that the Colonel cannot speak English, Walter fumbles along, managing ultimately to get out a few mangled words of Chinese, before the Colonel coolly reveals that he speaks English fluently, thank you very much.  Charlie's ignorance derives from the arrogance of power, but the Colonel's power play reveals that such arrogance masks a far more dangerous weakness.  (Kitty and Walter spend much of the film muddling along, unable to make even the most basic conversation with the Chinese townspeople.)  As it turns out, Walter experiences a political awakening on top of the emotional one he shares with Kitty.  Arguing with the Colonel, Walter exclaims that he has come with a "microscope," not with a gun--to which the Colonel quietly responds that, nevertheless, there are British guns behind him.  The film condemns not Walter's necessary medical interventions, which save lives, but the tainted circumstances under which those interventions occur.  But the film also genders political awareness as masculine: when Walter tells Kitty that the convent doesn't just take in orphans, but actually bribes parents in order to increase the potential supply of converts, she refuses to believe that it makes any difference. 

For all that the film wears its postcolonial politics on its sleeve,  there are some uncomfortable moments.  To begin with, Waddington's mistress, who in the novel appears to embody some kind of ancient, mysterious wisdom (stereotype #1), here becomes the essence of guiltless sex (stereotype #2).   And there's a chase sequence that verges on the imperial rape trope:  Kitty is chased and cornered by a group of outraged young men, then finally saved not by Walter, but by the Chinese soldier assigned to protect her.   All of this seems to be in keeping with, once again, the film's much more conventional understanding of how women function in something that ought to be a romance narrative. 

Comments

[John Thomas McGuire]

The truest version of a Somerset Maugham tale that I have seen is the 1929 version of THE LETTER starring Jeanne Eagels. In the film, we see the racism and sexism honestly presented, and we also witness Eagels's character evade justice at the end.

Unfortunately this film, unlike the worthy, if occasionally silly, 1940 version starring Bette Davis, is not widely available. I was lucky to watch it at the Museum of Modern Art exactly two years ago.

[Zora]

I thought that the insistent anti-colonialism and glorificaton of some of the Chinese characters was the price of filming in China (with Chinese government assistance). I would guess that the script had to get government approval before the filming could start.

Chinese film-makers, used to slipping criticism past the censors, can sometimes make overtly party-line films that are in fact trenchant criticisms of modern Chinese society (Raise High the Red Lantern). Sometimes they slip off the razor edge and make films that are bathetically patriotic (House of Flying Daggers).

The American filmmakers couldn't walk the razor edge.

[zunguzungu]

It seems to me that the film doesn't just offer a "critique of empire," it offers a specific critique of a specific *kind* of empire, which allows room for the kinds of uncomfortable racializations you observe (and a covert embrace of indirect forms of empire). As you put it, "The film condemns not Walter's necessary medical interventions, which save lives, but the tainted circumstances under which those interventions occur," but another way to put this would be that while it critiques British gunboat diplomacy, it has no trouble imagining a world in which helpless unscientific natives need to be helped out by scientific Westerners. The fact that it's an *American* movie is then completely relevant: the United States has never really been comfortable with the idea of direct colonization (having come late to that game) but instead prefers to mask its interventions under the aegis of liberal humanitarianism, like, for example, bringing technology to savages.