2 hours 41 minutes, UK/USA 1996
Director: Anthony Minghella; Producer: Saul Zaentz; Screenplay: Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje; Photography: John Seale; Production Design: Stuart Craig; Editing: Walter Murch; Music: Gabriel Yared.
Stars: Ralph Fiennes (Count Laszlo Almásy), Juliette Binoche (Hana), Willem Dafoe (Caravaggio), Kristin Scott Thomas (Katherine Clifton), Naveen Andrews (Kip), Colin Firth (Geoffrey Clifton), Julian Wadham (Madox), Jürgen Prochnow (German Officer), Kevin Whately (Sgt. Hardy), Clive Merrison (Fenelon-Barnes)
How can you begin to describe a film like The English Patient? Michael Ondaatje's sprawling, Booker-prize winning novel was described as 'unfilmable' by literary and cinema minds alike, but director Anthony Minghella has succeeded in creating a deeply moving, heartbreakingly romantic film which is at the same time both intimate and epic, invoking flashbacks to the time of David Lean and Lawrence Of Arabia. In fact, The English Patient owes a lot to that movie in terms of style and feeling, with its stunning desert panoramas and intense passion sizzling in the golden heat.
The film opens with a plane crash, in which a young couple are involved. A man is burned in the ensuing fire, but is rescued by Bedouin tribesmen who were passing by. The film then skips forward a few years to a military hospital in Italy. It is coming to the end of World War II, and a Canadian nurse named Hana (Juliette Binoche) is tending to the wounded. After a mortar attack on their camp, the medics decide to move their operation north and, during the journey, Hana befriends a horribly scarred man with amnesia, who is only known as 'The English Patient'. As the journey is obviously causing the English Patient considerable pain, and as he is at death's door anyway, Hana volunteers to stay behind in an abandoned monastery to care for him until he dies, and then catch up with her platoon in Leghorn. Whilst in the monastery, the English Patient's memory begins to return and he imparts a tragic tale to Hana, who in turn begins a relationship with a cheerful, handsome Sikh bomb disposal expert named Kip (Naveen Andrews). Not wanting to give too much of the plot away, it transpires that the English Patient is not English at all, but is a Hungarian Count named Laszlo Almásy who was part of a multi-national cartography expedition to North Africa. Whilst there, he embarked upon a passionate affair with Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) the wife of a colleague, the repercussions of which, combined with the imminent outbreak of war, foretold tragedy for all.
Yes, The English Patient won nine Oscars last week. The question everybody is asking is "Does it deserve them". The answer, in my opinion, is most definitely yes. The English Patient is one of those old-fashioned movies which sweeps you away to exotic locales, wraps you up in a swathe of romance and eroticism, and returns you to reality a couple of hours later emotionally drained, but with a sense of having experienced something magical. One of the most impressive things about The English Patient is the way in which the story unfolds in circular fashion, starting and ending with a plane crash in the desert. The whole film is geared to explaining who the people in the plane are, why they are there, and what has happened to them previously. Anthony Minghella's direction is superlative, and never once in the film was I confused as to which time period I was in, and who was doing what to whom, as can sometimes happen when stories are told in flashback. Both Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas are excellent as the doomed lovers at the centre of things. Fiennes' character is a repressed, introverted soul whose outward brusqueness hides an inner passion which only Scott Thomas could bring to the surface. Scott Thomas portrays Katherine as a woman who, despite her porcelain beauty, on the outside is a fun-loving and outgoing personality but who is locked in an unsatisfying marriage. The mystery of this handsome Hungarian brings to the fore in her a long-suppressed desire for a more emotionally-charged relationship, filled with excitement and wanton. The lust which slowly turns to love between the two is conveyed by elongated eye contact and secret encounters, as any such relationship would be severely frowned upon in the claustrophobic society in which they lived.
Another impressive element in The English Patient is that, whilst Hana listens to Almásy's tale, her relationship with Kip begins to mirror the previous one. Kip is an Asian Sikh, Hana a French-Canadian, which again would have been a disapproved-of union in a time when interracial love was comparatively unknown. Similarly, Kip's job as an army bomb-disposal expert hightens Hana's fears that everyone she ever loves dies. The two love stories - Lazslo and Katherine, Kip and Hana, are so woven together that you get a feeling of history repeating itself across the years. But the real finishing touch to this magnificent film is the way in which the imminent outbreak of war hangs over the love affairs like a dark cloud. The national politics of the time, as well as the two opposing sides of World War II, play a major part in the downfall of Almásy's affair. The ending has a particularly ironic and tragic twist, with the appearance of the character Caravaggio in the monastery bringing this to light.
Technically, of course, The English Patient, cannot be faulted. Cinematography by John Seale, production design by Stuart Craig, editing by Walter Murch, costume design by Anne Roth - all of these contribute to the feeling of a time and place long since gone. The music, by French composer Gabriel Yared, cleverly mixes native African instruments and a contemporary orchestra to add emotional resonance to the most dramatic scenes. Naturally, all of these people were given Oscars for their troubles.
There are so many intricacies within The English Patient that you could write a book explaining them all. My only advice is to see this film while the hype is still fresh in people's minds. And please don't be put off by the long running time, because this is a film which you simply cannot afford to miss.
A film review by Jonathan Broxton 1997