The Painted Veil

I like the moral complexity of this movie. At the start it seems that we are supposed to be sympathetic to Kitty because she is virtually sold off to her would-be husband Walter. The family believes that her time is ticking away and if she does not take action she will continue to be nothing more than a beautiful and useless burden on her father. Out of desperation, then, she marries a bacteriologist with whom she has little to nothing in common and shortly finds herself in Shanghai mostly alone and unfulfilled. To fill the void she becomes entangled in a romance with a married diplomat who--unbeknowst to her--has a penchant for frivolous women. When Walter learns of the affair, he proposes a divorce and announces that he will be moving to a remote interior town where he wants to help battle a cholera outbreak. At this point, Kitty appears to be the victim again, but it is hard not to understand Walter's actions. As the story develops, he immerses his rage in highly noble humanitarian actions, yet he causes her to suffer in the extreme. As I watched the film, I was constantly asking myself who was more at fault.

In the interim, we meet a French mother superior and a British bureaucrat who offer divergent views on life in a time of cholera that provide a counterpoint to Kitty and Walter's situation.

The story resolves the issues in the Fane marriage, both characters grow and the audience is left with a poignant ending. With the final piece of music a children's chorus singing "A La Claire Fontaine" the audience draws connections between water, disease, the emotional life, love and memories.

Famous Seamus

While researching blogs I found an article on the CBC site by Matthew McKinnon called "Our Home and Native Blogs" that lists the top ten blogs in Canada. He claims that his favorites "deliver a depth of knowledge, degree of passion and quality of writing that rival--or dare we admit, sometimes surpass--the efforts of the mainstream media and their fancy-pants journalists". Among the sites I checked out, I was especially intrigued by one called Bookninja The site is published by George Murray, Kathyryn Kuitenbrouwer and Peter Darby, all of whom are well ensconced in the literary world. I was pleased to see their entry on Seamus Heaney's latest prize, the 2006 Eliot prize for poetry. His newest collection District and Region is a look at a world "in which conflict is inescapable, war omnipresent". I'm afraid this is ringing true. I would like to read the collection.

A green Christmas

As the snow refused to fall and the weather found Floridian new ways of expressing Christmas in Nova Scotia, we were relegated to leaving the skis in the shed. While we weren't enjoying the winter wilderness of Kouchibiguac, we did watch An Inconvenient Truth. The saddest parts were watching a cartoon polar bear swimming desperately to reach a tiny icepan, and seeing Al Gore take a ride in a cherry-picker just to reach the top of the line on the graph showing the projected emissions of the near future. Strong visuals. At the same time, the media was replete with stories of climate change and George Monbiot got air time again and again on CBC. Interested in what he was saying, I read his book Heat, How to Save the Planet from Burning. Although his projections were equally gloomy, I did like the way he framed his discussion around solutions--too many to mention. I recommend reading it, or at least several chapters.