Based on a 1925 novel by W Somerset Maugham that took its title from a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley (stay awake at the back), The Painted Veil bears all the hallmarks of a highbrow literary adaptation of the Merchant Ivory school. The opening tableau of junks emerging out of the mist in Shanghai Harbour might as well have been lifted wholesale from The White Countess, that venerable outfit’s spectacularly tedious 2005 swansong. Appearances can be deceptive, though, and beneath the fusty trappings and exotic locations that automatically pigeonhole John Curran’s flick as an arthouse delectation lies a hotbed of illicit passion, bitter enmity and doomed amour, set against a backdrop of political unrest and deadly plague.
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