Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Liev Schreiber, Toby Jones, Diana Rigg Running time: 125 min . . . .

MAYBE they don't make movies like they used to, but John Curran's adaptation of Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel The Painted Veil, intelligently scripted by Roy Nyswaner, comes close. Although structured and paced in the tradition of the great sweeping melodramatic epics of David Lean, it never degenerates into decorative pastiche. It plays to the narrative skill of Maugham, one of the great story-tellers, but also to his ruthless anti-romanticism and unerring eye for the detail of sexual deception, in which he was ahead of his time.

Perhaps because Maugham was never quite accepted by the literary world . . . even he described himself as "one of the leading second-raters" . . . screen versions of his stories have been similarly regarded more as entertainment than serious cinema, and perhaps many of them were. But Curran's assured direction makes The Painted Veil a compelling exception.

Edward Norton, who is, with Naomi Watts one of the movie's producers, teams up with her to give one of the most ruthlessly telling portrayals of a marriage of opposites you're likely to encounter on the screen. The action unfolds in 1920s China in a time of cholera, but is framed by a prologue and epilogue in well-to-do London. Norton's Walter is a stiff and mannered bacteriologist . . . too shy to show his feelings or indulge in social chit-chat - who without warning blurts out a marriage proposal to Kitty (Watts) just as he's about to head off to Shanghai to take up a medical appointment. She hardly knows him . . . and the little she does know is hardly flattering . . . but impulsively accepts, partly to get away from her intolerably overbearing mother.

She's everything he isn't, sensual, abandoned, selfish and modern-minded.

Among the gin-swilling colonials in Shanghai she soon flowers, but not in Walter's gauche arms. She's too shallow to realise that even he . . . absorbed as he is with his test-tubes and research . . . will eventually learn about an affair she's having with a suave British vice-consul (Liev Schreiber).

Stung to the heart, he responds with a ruthlessness she never suspected he had in him. He informs her that he's accepted an appointment in a remote village where the plague is rife, and she must come with him. "Surely it's no place for a woman?

Why should I go?" "To cheer and comfort me, " he says, curtly. This sets up a journey into darkness that becomes the core of the movie and of their now combative relationship. While he immerses himself in trying to contain the epidemic and comfort the dying, totally ignoring her and apparently not caring what happens to her, she, for the first time in her life, is forced to think of people other than herself. Her only acquaintances are an alcoholic opium-smoking Englishman (Toby Jones) and the Mother Superior (Diana Rigg) of an orphanage who has fallen out of love with God but labours on regardless among the dead and dying.

If this situation seems somewhat theatrical it is made real by the physical immediacy of the harsh Chinese landscape and the ability cinematographer Stephen Dryburgh to capture both its intimidating vastness but also the immediacy of the human drama with ravishingly intimate close-ups. The performances are terrific, allowing the characters gradually to transform and find themselves with total credibility.