Director John Curran's film of Somerset Maugham's novel, set mainly in 1920s China, certainly looks fabulous, thanks to extensive location filming.

Dramatically, it's a bit dull, despite the valiant efforts of leading players Naomi Watts and Edward Norton.

He plays young middle-class doctor Walter Fane, who falls for and weds upper class Kitty (Watts), a rebellious young woman approaching that age where society dictates she should be married and breeding. Her main motive isn't so much love as the desire to escape the clutches of her overbearing mother.

She's not quite so keen on going to China, where her husband takes a job and she takes a lover, the English vice consul (Liev Schreiber). When Fane discovers her indiscretion, he takes them off to a remote village in the grip of a deadly cholera epidemic. He sure knows how to romance a lady.

Life and death among the sufferers gives both new purpose in rebuilding their life, although tragedy is just round the corner.

Norton and Watts, both armed with persuasive English accents, give good accounts of a couple struggling to find love among the ruins of their marriage and in a country undergoing political and social upheaval.

There are excellent supporting turns from Toby Jones, so good as Truman Capote in Infamous, as a district commissioner, and Diana Rigg as Mother Superior of the local convent.