Retrospective: The English Patient (1996)
By Eugene Z. Xia
A piece of rough brown paper fills the screen. A brush gently traces an abstract figure of an ancient swimmer. The brown canvas gradually transforms into a blurred image of the ancient Sahara that suggests a feminine body and surmises infinity. The swimmer fades into a bi-plane that along with Wagner-like music soars above the desert and, true to Wagnerian form, bursts into a blazing fire.
Like so many epic poems, The English Patient begins its story in the middle. From this point, it relates two love stories, one in the past and one in the future. The one in the past is constructed in the tradition of a grand romantic tragedy. It is a story of forbidden love: Two people driven and compelled by passion to do something the ordinary people would never do. While the events of that story happened only a few years ago, the setting suggests that it might as well have happened thousands of years ago. The remote desert serves as a vast theater upon which a grand tragedy unfolds as similar events must have occurred and repeated again and again for countless many times. As a perfect theater, the desert remains the same for eons leaving no trace of the drama that once unfolded upon it.
It is a cosmic story. The two main characters were carefully and deliberately constructed out of their respected space and time--remote, grand and mythical. Unlike the people around them, they were the only ones who truly lived in and belonged to the desert, and totally oblivious to the contemporary events unfolding around them. They understood the desert and its intricate language and the desert embraced them. They never said much to each other, but the desert spoke for them and declared their love-- the sand storm and the stars it obliterated, Herodotus and his story of Gyges and the rain of blood on the English coast, a place and time even more remote than the desert. They lived in the time and the cave of the swimmers.
In an ancient monastery of Italy, another love story unfolds--not grand and cosmic, but an intimate one of plums, gardens and olive oil. In contrast to the desert which obliterates everything, here all is green and steeped in history. In this story, Count Almasy is like an ancient relic both physically and psychologically. Structurally, all this serves to push the first story further back in time. Ultimately, this too is a story of doomed love, but in a very human way.
The four lead actors did a fine job, but not outstanding. In a film of this nature, a competent performance is all that is required. Fiennes and Thomas come out far better than Andrews and Binoche but this is because Fiennes and Thomas had roles that are far better written. Binoche's character had a few cliches such as "Everyone I loved is dead" and in general suffers from talking a bit too much. Andrews' character is not well developed.
The true star of the film is the desert and the desert speaks with the most solemn voice. There was a scene in which a few characters exchanged a few comic lines. Then suddenly, came this overwhelming echo of a Muslim prayer. Before seeing this film, I always thought these prayers a bit quaint.
Toward the end, we return to the desert with Almasy as his plane takes off while Hana and Kathrine's voices merge into one, declaring they being the real country, and we remember the image of the infinite Sahara at the beginning that resembles a feminine body.
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