The Painted Veil

　　Amber 1:  Hello, I'm Amber and this is bbclearningenglish.com.

　　In Entertainment today, we listen to a review of a new Hollywood film, The

　　Painted Veil, and we hear how the film – which stars Naomi Watts 2 and Edward

　　Norton – is different from the classic English novel on which it's based.

　　Somerset Maugham's novel The Painted Veil tells the story of Kitty and Walter

　　Fane, a young English couple in the 1920s, who marry for the wrong reasons.

　　Kitty is a shallow rich girl who doesn't love Walter, but wants to escape from

　　her family. Walter is a doctor, an expert in infectious diseases, and he's a

　　serious, rather uptight 3 person, although he loves his new wife very much.

　　The Fanes move to China, and Kitty meets Charles Townsend, an older,

　　married British diplomat 4 and has a passionate 5 affair with him ...

　　We asked the novelist Francis King (who knew Somerset Maugham) if he

　　agreed with critics that the new film of The Painted Veil doesn't show the

　　powerful passion of Kitty and Townsend's affair, and this is surprising as films

　　today have a greater freedom to depict 6 sexual love.

　　As you listen to his answer, try to catch the expression Francis uses to stress

　　the strength of Kitty's desire for Townsend.

　　Francis King

　　'Yes, with the affair between Kitty and Townsend, they could have shown much more of that

　　because it is a tremendous, passionate affair. She's absolutely obsessed 7 with sex with him –

　　that never comes across really. You just see them once, when the door handle is turning, and

　　that's all. So it is very old-fashioned in many ways, and the slowness of pace, I thought, was

　　old-fashioned.'

　　Amber:       Did you catch it? Frances says Kitty is 'absolutely obsessed with' sex with

　　Townsend. 'To be obsessed with something' is a very current expression in

　　English and it means that you're unable to stop thinking about something.

　　Frances calls the film 'old-fashioned' – this expression is usually (as it is here)

　　used disapprovingly 8 – he means it's not a modern film, and he thinks it should

　　have been. For example, he says it had a 'slowness of pace' and most films

　　today are very fast-moving! Listen again.

　　Francis King

　　'Yes, with the affair between Kitty and Townsend, they could have shown much more of that

　　because it is a tremendous, passionate affair. She's absolutely obsessed with sex with him –

　　that never comes across really. You just see them once, when the door handle is turning, and

　　that's all. So it is very old-fashioned in many ways, and the slowness of pace, I thought, was

　　old-fashioned.'

　　Amber:  To punish Kitty for her affair with Townsend, Walter takes his wife to a remote

　　Chinese village where cholera 9 has broken out … and we learn a lot more about

　　this terrible epidemic 10 in the film than we do in the novel.

　　Next, the BBC interviewer, Mark Lawson, asks Frances to comment on the

　　language in the film and how he thinks it sounds to us today. Most of the

　　dialogue in the film is taken directly from the 'vintage' (old) novel and it

　　conveys how repressed the characters are – remember the story is set and was

　　written in the mid-1920s.

　　Notice the description 'anachronisms of language and delivery' – an

　　anachronism is something which exists out of its time in history.

　　Mark Lawson and Francis King

　　'One of the objections that some people have when stories of this vintage are done now is that

　　there are anachronisms of language and of delivery. I wondered about the language – at one

　　point the doctor says, 'I need to speak with you,' which sounded slightly wrong to me.

　　Completely wrong, yes. 'I need to have a word with you,' he'd have probably said, yes.'

　　Amber:  While Walter works selflessly to help the Chinese villagers, Kitty begins to

　　see her husband in a new light, and their marriage slowly blossoms into love.

　　But then tragedy strikes … and Kitty is forced to examine the choices she

　　has made.

　　Most of The Painted Veil was filmed in China, and Frances says the scenery

　　in the film is 'absolutely superb' – it's excellent – although there is very

　　little description of the landscape in the novel. But he says the film doesn't

　　really show Kitty's 'spiritual' journey – how her deep feelings and beliefs

　　change – and how she 'ends up' a 'totally changed' person.

　　Francis King

　　'Here it was absolutely superb, but I get rather tired of all those jagged mountains and the

　　water underneath 11 them – they seem to keep coming back, those mountains, and I felt what the

　　film didn't bring out was that it's not just a geographical 12 journey for Kitty, the heroine, it's

　　also a spiritual one – at the end of the novel, she ends up totally changed, she's a different

　　person, and I don't think you got that feeling from the film at all.'

　　Amber:   Now let's recap the language we focussed on.

　　to be obsessed with something – to be unable to stop thinking about

　　something

　　old-fashioned – not modern, more typical of a time in the past

　　vintage – old, and of high quality and lasting value