The Painted Veil
Even though movies typically get butchered for showing on airplanes (and then the screen is just miserable), there's the occasional movie that grabs me.
On the latest transatlantic flight, I was lucky to watch The Painted Veil, after a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Naomi Watts and Ed Norton play the main characters. The story is set in 1920s Southern China, where a freshly-married English couple moves from London to Shanghai. The two of them don't really love each other, she meets another man, there's adultery; he (cruelly?) threatens divorce unless she joins him on a daunting mission to a cholera-infested area where he'll help as a microbiologist and M.D., and where they may both well die.
And there, the real story begins. I'll leave it at that to not post too much of a spoiler.
It's love story, big drama, tragedy, with great music and marvelous photography to underpin it all.
