A director brave enough to make a film taken out of a Somerset Maugham story these days had better have good actors to turn the phrases. Fortunately, John Curran has an excellent cast for this bittersweet but by no means over-sentimental romance. And since it is set in Twenties China, he has the advantage of a certain exoticism, too.

Edward Norton plays Walter, a middle-class bacteriologist who conducts a whirlwind courtship with upper-class Kitty (Naomi Watts), marries her and relocates to Shanghai. It is not a marriage made in heaven and she's soon having an affair with a charming but married bounder (Liev Schreiber).

Walter is quietly furious and resolves to accept a job in a remote village ravaged by cholera. He'll divorce her if she doesn't come with him and, if she does, he'll still extract a sullen revenge.

Will the pair find some kind of understanding? We know they probably will, but so well do Norton and Watts play that we are never quite sure of what will happen. Neither player is British but each gives the kind of performance that seems apt for the socially-conscious colonial period that Maugham was writing about.

There are two other fine portraits. Toby Jones is the eccentric Deputy Commissioner for the stricken area and Diana Rigg is the Mother Superior of the village convent, who tells Kitty that her marriage to God is just as fraught as hers to Walter.

This is a story not so much about China as about the colonial mindset, but Stuart Dryburgh's eloquent cinematography and Alexandre Desplat's fine score help Curran to make a period piece that is both accurate to its time and able to transcend it, too.

If it is conventionally made and a little too long, The Painted Veil has much to commend it. And in Norton it surely has one of the best and most versatile actors America can muster at present.