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Ralph Fiennes excels as the tragic The English Patient |
Director: Anthony Minghella
Cast: Ralph Fiennes (Count Almasy), Juliette Binoche (Hana),
Willem Dafoe (David Caravaggio), Kristin Scott Thomas (Katherine Clifton),
Naveen Andrews (Kip), Colin Firth (Geoffrey Clifton), Julian Wadham (Maddox),
Jurgen Prochnow (Major Muller), Kevin Whatley (Sergeant Hardy), Clive Merrison
(Colonel Fenelon-Barnes), Nino Castelnuovo (D’Agostino)
Sweeping, luscious, beautiful and an epic translation of an
almost unfilmable novel into something supremely cinematic,
The English
Patient swept the board with nine Oscars at the 1996 Academy Awards.
The
English Patient has sometimes had a rocky reputation (not helped by an
episode of
Seinfeld where Elaine was famously non-plussed by the film). Like
some of Minghella’s later work, it’s almost too well made for some to get past,
looking like prime award bait. I didn’t “get it” the first time I watched it.
But I – and the naysayers – were wrong:
The English Patient is rich,
rewarding and throbbing with a very British sense of repressed emotion and slow
embracing of dangerous passions.
Adapted from Michael Ondatje’s multiple-award-winning novel,
it unfolds across two time frames, hinging on a plane crash in the Sahara in
1942 that opens the film and leaves its pilot, Hungarian Count Almasy (Ralph
Fiennes), hideously burned beyond recognition. The entire film is both an
epilogue to that crash and a prologue explaining how we got there. In 1945,
Almasy asserts he remembers nothing, even his own name. In what we later learn
is a bitter irony, he is mistaken for an Englishman due to his perfect English.
He is nursed through the final days of his life in an abandoned Italian
monastery by a Canadian nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche), who has lost nearly
everyone she loves in the war. Through Almasy’s memories, we see his life
before the war as part of an international society of cartographers. In
particular, the love affair that grows between him and Katherine Clifton
(Kristin Scott-Thomas), the wife of another member of the society – an affair
that will have life-shattering repercussions.
Appreciation for Minghella’s film must start with his
ingenious screenplay. The English Patient, a book that moves
eclectically between multiple timelines, shifting perspective frequently, and
delivers its story in almost impossibly rich prose, should have been
unfilmable. Minghella creates something which is both a mirror of the book’s
intention, but also a cinematic text. You could use this as a teaching tool for
adaptation (bizarrely one of the few Oscars it didn’t win was for
Screenplay!). Working in close partnership with editor Walter Murch, Minghella’s
film effortlessly cuts back and forth between at least three timelines, but never
once confuses or jars. With (according to Murch) over 40 time transitions
(that’s one almost every 3-4 minutes, fact fans), this could have been a
jarring, impossible to follow mess. Instead, narrative clarity is its
watchword.
But the film also succeeds because it’s the apex of
Minghella’s ability to combine luscious, poetic story-telling with acute
emotion and passion. It shouldn’t be a surprise that someone who showed such understanding
of grief in Truly, Madly, Deeply acutely understands how joy and pain
can go hand-in-hand in love. Perhaps one of the reasons people found this a
difficult film is that Almasy and Katherine are not a traditional romantic
pairing. Both guarded, sometimes even cold and distant people, they are
tentative, perhaps even scared, of the deep bond they immediately feel. A bond
that burns all the more brightly because of the compromises and barriers in
their emotional lives.
Almasy is distant, aloof, a man easy to know but impossible
to understand. Katherine has a very English reserve behind a certain patrician
warmth, playful at times but very aware of duty. What’s fascinating – and
moving – about the film, is that these two people actually have a huge
groundswell of passion between them. They are besotted with each other, but for
reasons ranging from background to their own fears of emotional involvement,
struggle to admit it to each other. They fling themselves at each other in
romantic couplings with an almost animalistic longing. They make each other
laugh. They allow themselves to speak of deep feelings, experiences and
thoughts that they would not express to others. And they are also able to hurt
each other through resentments, distances and shunnings in a way no one else
could.

It’s a decidedly unconventional romance – compare it to,
say, the next year’s Oscar winner Titanic with its far more conventional
love story – but it works wonderfully. The slight air of repression also means
that the confessions of deep-rooted feelings – Scott Thomas’ reveal of a gift
she has never parted from, or Fiennes’ face twisted in emotional anguish –
carry huge impact.
It also helps that the film is set in the sort of grand
vistas that David Lean would be proud of. While you can certainly argue (with
some justification) that The English Patient is a picture postcard film,
its perfect visuals of the desert, the stunning beauty of so many of its shots,
add to the extraordinary luscious old-fashioned 1930s romance of its setting. It
could all be taking place in a world of von Sternbergesque romanticism.
Minghella’s film also interweaves skilfully the 1945 story
line, revolving around Juliette Binoche’s Hana. Binoche won a deserved Oscar
for a sensitive, vulnerable performance as a woman terrified of emotional
commitment (sound familiar?), scared anyone she grows close to is doomed to die.
Her romance with bomb disposal expert Kip (a strikingly delicate performance
from Naveen Andrews, with just enough hints of anti-colonial tension mixed in)
seems ready to fit this trope, but instead develops in unexpected ways. It also
contributes perhaps the film’s most sweepingly romantic moment when Kip uses a
pulley system, a flare and a bit of muscle to give Hana a sweeping up-close
look at some Renaissance frescos. But while our flashback romance has the
foreboding of doom to it, this one instead shows us the hope of a life
restarting.

The English Patient also makes some striking points
about the insane foolishness not just of war, but nationalism and Empire. The
cartographers are a pan-European group who come together as equals, disregarding
all concerns of nation. Instead they find a freedom to behave – intellectually,
emotionally and sexually – in a way they never could “at home”. They represent
a chance of being free to make our own choices, rather than dictated by
arbitrary borders. Problems of nationhood are what will bring disaster.
Colonialism is viewed equally critically: Kip gets sharp digs in at Kipling and
also makes clear that his status as an Indian officer in the British Army is one
of uncertainty.
Minghella’s film also works because of the mastery of the
performances. Fiennes is in nearly every scene (many of them under a layer of
make-up), and the role is a perfect match for the surface coldness in his
performance style, which hides his wit and sensitivity. Cheated of the Oscar,
Fiennes has rarely been better – his clipped romanticism mellowing in the 1945
section as a gentler but broken man. Scott-Thomas is perfectly cast – I’m not
sure any other film has used her skills better – as a woman who compromised on
happiness at the wrong time, and now cannot express herself.
The English Patient is a romance of slow moments, of
inferred passions, which only at a few points before the end flower into
something intimate. But it carries a huge emotional force, precisely because of
this. Its technical work is faultless – Gabriel Yared’s score is a sumptuous
mix of inspirations – and the acting superb (as well as the stars, Firth is
marvellous as a decent but dull man cuckolded, Dafoe adds a layer of
unpredictability as a 1945 houseguest and Whatley is the picture of
working-class decency in a rare film role). The English Patient is
Booker-prize film-making in its depth, richness and the work it asks you to put
in, mixed with a David-Lean-meets-Mills-and-Boon pictorial loveliness, where each
frame is a sun-kissed example of pictorial perfection. Mixed together, it makes
for a sumptuous and deeply emotional package that I find more and more
rewarding with every viewing.