This sort of thing used to be a reliable staple of film and literature, writes Donald Clarke
The diseased colonial servant in his sweaty linen suit drinks bad gin while his wife - brighter than him, but frustrated by convention - cuddles up to a less reserved, more cynical white man (played, more often than not, by Peter Finch). Meanwhile, the natives do whatever it is foreigners do.
Their lack of interest in the indigenous citizens ultimately rendered these yarns somewhat unfashionable, but the soiled romance and elegant dissolution of such novels as W Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil - a tale from 1920s China - remains undeniably appealing. Directed by John Curran, whose We Don't Live Here Anymore won praise in 2004, this new version is nicely photographed and doesn't stint on the steamy atmosphere, but certain nagging infelicities do lessen its impact.
Edward Norton, all sphincter vowels and lipless scowls, plays a distinguished bacteriologist, who, after a notably frigid courting period, finds himself married to Naomi Watts's emotionally immature misery- guts. After dallying briefly in London, they make their way to Shanghai, where Watts, bored by the endless run of cocktail parties, falls into the arms of simmering Liev Schreiber.
When Norton discovers the deception, he carts the memsahib off to a section of the Chinese interior ravaged by a cholera epidemic. We begin to suspect he would not be all that distressed if the disease got hold of his unfaithful partner.
Shot largely within China, the film looks reasonably convincing and is graced with a superbly dog-eared performance from Toby Jones as the locale's obligatory English roué. Watts is equally good as a woman who, like her husband, slowly begins to realise she might have married well after all.
Other aspects jar, however. Norton contorts his face into desperate grimaces as he strains to appear English, but, never sure to which class his character belongs, ends up looking more constipated than psychologically tortured. Still, he does a better job at seeming British than the urban locations - somewhere in Australia, I suspect - do at standing in for London. If St James's really looked that blissfully tropical, then doctors and their untrustworthy wives would, surely, never leave.
