I had been interested in this passion project from Edward Norton for some time, especially since it was shot in China, and has the great Anthony Wong Chau Sang as a supporting actor, and I have to say I enjoyed the film. It felt much like a merchant ivory film in pace, and acting, though the most distracting thing was the lighting. The night scenes had a bad key to fill ratio, where the key light was just too bright, and the fill too dark, so it looked very unnatural, especially with the lighting supposed to be simple oil lamps. Still the rest of the movie was very enjoyable, with a slow paced and well done love story, and a great dark ending. Well worth checking out, though the DVD is badly compressed and has much noise in dark portions (of which there are many).

In the 1920′s in England, Kitty (Naomi Watts) an unmarried, fairly spoiled upper crust woman. A quite and shy man, Dr. Walter Fane (Edward Norton) an M.D. and bacteriologist who works as a civil servant in Shanghai comes and meets her and proposes to her, and amazingly she agrees, and they are married and head to Shanghai, but things are not ideal for long. Quickly things turn sour as Kitty starts a relationship with a married man who works for the British government named Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber), and Walter finds out. He decides to give his wife a choice. There is a terrible cholera outbreak in the countryside, and he volunteers to go, and he will expose and divorce Kitty if she does not go with him, so she heads to the remote China countryside with her estranged husband.

REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS…

it is a bad time in China, when Warlords rule, and the Nationalists do not like the foreign aggressors still being in China, and the people don’t either. Walter meets up with the only government official Waddington (Toby Jones), a man who has a chinese mistress from a family he once helped. And a Nationalist Colonel Yu (Anthony Wong Chau Sang) as well as group of nuns run by a mother superior (Diana Rigg) who run an orphanage and hospital. Walter becomes very unpopular quickly closing off the well, and trying to get Yu to help him to close the river since the graves are too close to the river, he also wants people to start burying the dead right away.

At first Kitty hates his wife as much as she hates him, but slowly she starts to respect and maybe even love him. She starts working with the nuns, and eventually Kitty and Walter come back together, just as he helps to make a water system for the town, but then she realizes she is pregnant, and doesn’t know who the father is, but the manage to try and keep it together until…

A bunch of infected refugees head toward the town, and Walter and Yu stop them and create a refugee camp, but quickly Walter comes down sick, and Kitty goes to nurse him, but he dies.

We cut to 5 years later, and Kitty is raising their son, and runs into Townsend, who wants to sleep with her again, but she blows him off, as she found her love.

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A beautiful, if slightly strange, but enjoyable film.