Love hurts (and then you die)

Watched The Painted Veil, an adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham novel of the same title. I would have liked to read the book first but the pirated DVD (and impatience) won out in the end. A shame, actually, since I’m sure Maugham’s characterizations would have been a fascinating read; he always was adept at vivifying characters. Still, the film was interesting. The kind that has you dragging on a cigarette afterwards while you quietly ponder the tragedy of the characters. In the movie, Walter Fane, a young somber bacteriologist, travels to colonial period Shanghai with his wife, Kitty, a sociable but shallow young woman. Unhappy with her marriage and life at the colony, she takes on a lover but her affair is soon discovered by her husband. Wanting to punish his wife, he volunteers to work in a remote Chinese village where a cholera epidemic rages. Amidst the trials of living in less than ideal conditions and the uncertainties and challenges of helping a community in turmoil, the spouses overcome their bitterness and find a deeper, nobler purpose and in the process they rediscover and eventually forgive each other. In the end, it’s a story of personal redemption. Much like my other favorite, a similarly-themed movie called The Sheltering Sky, based on a novel by Paul Bowles. Kit and Port Moresby (a little inside joke by Bowles there), a blasé couple who fancy themselves as travelers ("We're not tourists, we're travelers. Tourists are people who think about going home the minute they come, whereas travelers may not come back at all."), embark on a journey to 1940s North Africa in an effort to escape from the familiar and perhaps, rekindle their marriage. But their journey across the Sahara only highlights the interminable gulf that has grown between them after 10 years of being together. As in The Painted Veil, redemption comes only after great suffering; and in both films, comes a little too late.

I’ve always been drawn to love stories that aren’t quite about love but rather about people struggling with themselves; the relationship merely acting as a catalyst that forces a person to come to terms with his flaws, his demons. In real life, love is as much an individual struggle as it is a drag-out battle between two people, which often leaves both parties deeply, if not, terminally wounded. Grace happens when the individual finds redemption for himself. When a couple still finds love amidst the ruins of their struggle for personal salvation, that’s a miracle. And the small miracles that sometimes happen between people are, ultimately, what these two films illustrate.