Directed by John Curran

Lovers of good old-fashioned melodrama with exotic locations will enjoy this Somerset Maugham adaptation, which was originally filmed in the Thirties with Garbo in the leading role here taken by Naomi Watts. But excellent performances from the leading actors can't quite salvage it from a certain coldness and disengagement from the audience. It's the story of Kitty (Watts), a young woman who marries a man she does not love in a desperate attempt to escape her loathed family.

Walter (Edward Norton) is an earnest and reserved bacteriologist with a job in Shanghai. The problem is that these two are not much more than ciphers at the beginning of the marriage, and the film, no doubt eager to whisk us away to the picturesque orient, does not spend long enough establishing their characters and enlisting our interest and sympathy. The marriage seems impossibly out of the blue - one minute the two are meeting for apparently the first time at a party, next day almost he's taking her to a flower shop, declaring love, and proposing. ‘You can knock me down with a feather,' says this unflappable flapper rather endearingly. But un-enamoured though she clearly is, she accepts.

Once in Shanghai, this marriage of one-sided love looks set to be a dull and frustrated business, but Charlie Townshend (Liev Shreiber), the local alpha male from the British Consulate, soon whirls her off her feet and it's sweaty afternoons behind the locked bedroom door while good old Walter fights the germs in the world outside. But bacteriologists, like worms, can turn, and when Walter learns all, his love freezes to glacial hate, and next thing he's taking Kitty off with suicidal and sadistic zeal to a region up country where cholera is raging, and a horrible death could well await them both.

Despairing hate in a way brings them closer together, and soon they're vying at risk-taking - you haven't been inoculated? Then neither will I. You're eating that dangerous raw food? Pass it over here...

Not just cholera but the civil unrest of emergent independent China threaten the Europeans there, including Waddington, the cynical but kindly British representative, nicely played by Toby James, and the sisters in the local nunnery, whose Mother Superior is played by an feisty but alarmingly elderly looking Diana Rigg. Emma Peel, has it really come to this? But in this beleaguered setting Kitty and Walter discover other sides to each others' and their own characters, and the real love story begins.

Naomi Watts is no Garbo with her exalted suffering romanticism, but a more believable flawed human being; Edward Norton adds to his gallery of tortured introverts; both do well with the stilted accents of the English ruling class, to match the uptight and controlled dialogue and the subtle developments of their passion. The locations are lush, mournful and beautiful (in comparison with the Thirties film, which was studio-shot with a few interpolated travelogue scenes from China). If we'd cared a little more about the pair from the beginning, the whole might engage our attention better than it does, and the end prove more moving.

Seen at Empire Cinema, Newcastle, 19 April 2007