Time will tell whether ‘Norton-Watts’ will carry the same weight as ‘Merchant-Ivory’ in terms of high-brow literary adaptations, but with the latter partnership at an end, the two stars’ production of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil ably fills the void.

Under the eye of her We Don’t Live Here Anymore director John Curran, Watts plays Kitty, a self-centred social butterfly who marries Norton’s starchy bacteriologist Walter Fane simply because it’s the done thing in 1923.

The couple take up residence in Shanghai where Walter’s workaholism drives Kitty into the arms of the charming and very married British Vice Consul (Schrieber). Their affair is rumbled.

Kitty is left with no choice but to accompany Walter into the middle of a rural cholera epidemic. It is a calculated and paradoxical ploy: by easing the suffering of others, he can increase that of his unfaithful, unloving wife.

In the rare periods when he is not at his clinic, Walter treats Kitty with coldness and contempt. And the growing conflict between rebel warlords and imperialist forces means that she is almost a prisoner in her own home.

Her only contact with the outside world is Waddington (Jones, excellent again), a diplomat who stays for reasons other than colonial duty. He takes her to the local orphanage where she meets a Mother Superior (Rigg) with a marriage counselling habit.

Gradually, Kitty and Walter discover each other’s hidden qualities; their understanding leads to love and forgiveness.

That they only get to know one another after making a commitment is just one of the film’s many ironies.

With the Chinese countryside providing a lush backdrop to grim scenes of disease, Curran also forgoes the coyness and polish that has a distancing effect in most period romances.

Pacing, however, is not his forte. If the denouement is rather drawn out, the hurried beginning sees Walter and Kitty married and in China before teacups can be set back on saucers.

But, at the remains of the day, the Merchant-Ivory legacy lives on. This is drama for grown-ups - elegant, absorbing and rewarding.

Elliott Noble