The English Patient

 

 

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There is a scene in the movie, where Ralph Fiennes carries the wounded Kristin Scott Thomas into a desert cave. Over the threshold, draped in white he promises to always protect her. There were no priests, no family, no friends, no guests - yet, to me this is one of the most beautiful wedding scenes ever captured on film.

Love and Betrayal. God and Country. Courage and Frailty. The whole range of Human Condition is captured on a canvas of infinite sands and beige dreams.

This is a breathtaking film that got the Oscar acclaim it deserved. A Modern Classic - people of coming generations will talk of this film the same way we talk about CASABLANKA.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

There is a scene in the movie, where Ralph Fiennes carries the wounded Kristin Scott Thomas into a desert cave. Over the threshold, draped in white he promises to always protect her. There were no priests, no family, no friends, no guests - yet, to me this is one of the most beautiful wedding scenes ever captured on film.

Love and Betrayal. God and Country. Courage and Frailty. The whole range of Human Condition is captured on a canvas of infinite sands and beige dreams.

This is a breathtaking film that got the Oscar acclaim it deserved. A Modern Classic - people of coming generations will talk of this film the same way we talk about CASABLANKA.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

After the publication of Michael Ondaatje's Booker-Prize-winning "English Patient," conventional wisdom soon held that the novel, while a masterpiece of fiction, was entirely untransferable to any other medium: too intricately layered seemed its narrative structure; too significant its protagonists' inner life; too rich its symbolism. Then along came Anthony Minghella, who reportedly read it in a single sitting and was so disoriented afterwards that he didn't even remember where he was -- but who called producer Paul Zaentz the very next morning and talked him into bringing the novel to the screen. Two major studios and several fights over the casting of key roles later, the result were an astonishing nine Oscars (Best Picture, Director - Anthony Minghella -, Supporting Actress - Juliette Binoche -, Cinematography, Editing, Art Direction, Costume Design, Original Score and Sound), as well as scores of other awards.

"The English Patient" is an epic tale of love and loss; of ownership, belonging and the bars erected thereto. It unites the stories of five people: Hungarian count Laszlo de Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), mistaken as English by a British Army medical unit in Italy after professing to have forgotten his identity; Hana (Juliette Binoche), Almasy's Canadian nurse; Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), his erstwhile lover; Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh sapper and Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), an ex-spy and thief. All outsiders, they are struggling to come to terms with their lives: Almasy, on his deathbed, reflects back to his life as a North African explorer and his affair with Katherine; Hana believes herself cursed because everybody she cares for dies (in the movie her fiance and her best friend; in the novel her fiance, her father and her unborn baby), Katherine is taken to an all-male company of explorers in Cairo by her husband Geoffrey (Colin Firth), Kip, like Hana, is far away from home (the only Indian in an otherwise British and Italian environment) and Caravaggio lost his livelihood after his thumbs were cut off in captivity by the Germans, on a sadistic officer (Juergen Prochnow)'s orders.

Like the novel, the movie's story largely unfolds in flashbacks: After Hana convinces her superiors to let her stay and nurse Almasy in an abandoned Tuscan villa, she and new arrival Caravaggio, who holds Almasy responsible for his fate, extract the details of his life in Africa and the truth about Katherine, Geoffrey and the events uniting him with the Cliftons and Caravaggio from Almasy in a series of conversations. But at the same time, the story is anchored in the present by Hana's growing attachment to Kip, which shines a different light on the themes also driving Almasy and his relationship with Katherine. The film's outstanding cast, which in key roles also includes Julian Wadham as Almasy's friend Madox and Kevin Whately as Kip's sergeant Hardy carries the story marvelously: Probably their biggest award loss (besides Fiennes's and Scott Thomas's Oscar and other "best lead" nominations and Minghella's screenplay Oscar nomination) was the 1997 SAG ensemble award, which instead went to "The Birdcage."

In his screenplay Minghella made several changes vis-a-vis the novel; the biggest of these doubtlessly a shift in focus from Hana, Caravaggio and Kip to Almasy and Katherine, and the fact that the film is much more explicit about Almasy's identity than the novel. Both were wise choices: Hana's inner demons in the novel are largely exactly that -- *inner* demons, moreover, substantially grounded in the past and thus even more difficult to portray than Almasy's and Katherine's. Similarly, once the focus had moved to the latter couple, Kip's back story would have extended the movie without significantly advancing it; and the same is true for the intersections between Caravaggio's path and that of Hana's father. Secondly, mistaken *national* identity is overall more central to Almasy's character than identity as such; so the novel's intricate mystery about his persona might well have proven unnecessarily distracting in the movie's context. Indeed, once Almasy had become the story's greatest focus, much of its symbolism virtually even required that there be no real doubt about his identity.

But in all core respects, Minghella remained faithful to Ondaatje's novel; particularly regarding its profoundly impressionistic imagery, as shown, for example, in the curves formed by the Northern African desert's endless sand dunes, which in John Seale's magnificent and justly awardwinning cinematography resemble those of a woman's body as much as they do in Ondaatje's language, thus uniting Almasy's two greatest loves in a single symbol.

Doubtlessly the most important image is that of maps: Guides to unknown places like those drawn by Almasy and his friends during their explorations, but also tools of ownership like the cartography of Northern Africa made possible by Geoffrey Clifton's photos, and ultimately symbols of betrayal, as Almasy surrenders his maps to the Germans in exchange for a plane after he feels deserted by the British. And while Kip, who spends all day searching for bombs but wants to be found at night, guides Hana to himself by a series of tiny signposts in the form of oil lamps -- but still never tries to expect her, in order not to get too much attached to her -- Almasy, the perpetual loner who declares that he hates ownership more than anything else, gets so attached to Katherine that he claims her suprasternal notch as his exclusive property and later refers to her as his wife, which due to her marriage to Geoffrey she couldn't truly be in life and could only symbolically become in death. -- The final word on maps, belonging and ownership, however, is part of Katherine's legacy to Almasy (and I still prefer the novel's language here):

"I believe in such cartography -- to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. ... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps."

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5.0 out of 5 stars I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything...
I have come to the conclusion, and I am a big fan of movies from all eras, that this is the best film ever made. Read more

Published 15 months ago by Robert W. Reader

3.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional Visuals, but Over-Hyped Otherwise
Stunning visuals are really the saving grace of this somewhat over-hyped movie, based on a much better book. Read more

Published on July 24 2008 by B. Keith

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Adventure ... Magnificent Love/War Epic
Ralph Fiennes plays the handsome Hungarian Count Laszlo Almassy who is a quiet, intense, sensitive educated man. Read more

Published on Jun 21 2006 by Erika Borsos

5.0 out of 5 stars Ownership, belonging and an earth without maps.
After the publication of Michael Ondaatje's Booker-Prize-winning "English Patient," conventional wisdom soon held that the novel, while a masterpiece of fiction, was... Read more

Published on May 15 2004 by Themis-Athena

4.0 out of 5 stars A very touching movie
As a devoted Ralph Fiennes fan, i just had to watch this film. Don't let the length scare you,the story is well transferred into the movie and it may seem boring in the beginning... Read more

Published on Oct 31 2002 by Olga

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