THE ENGLISH PATIENT
A film review by Ivana Redwine
Copyright 1996 Ivana Redwine
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas, Naveen Andrews, Colin Firth, Julian Wadham, Juergen Prochnow, Kevin Whately, Clive Merrison, Nino Castelnuovo, Hichem Rostom. Directed by Anthony Minghella. Screenplay: Anthony Minghella, based on a novel by Michael Ondaatje. MPAA Rating: R (Sexuality, Violence, Language). Running Time:162 Minutes.
WARNING: This review contains spoilers.
A brilliant, if rather loose, adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's popular prizewinning novel, THE ENGLISH PATIENT is an intellectually intense and psychologically complex film that conveys the haunting power of memory. A great screen romance in the tradition of CASABLANCA and DR. ZHIVAGO, the film is also a tragedy and a fascinating mystery. Moreover, THE ENGLISH PATIENT takes on such subjects as the horror of war and the power of love.
The film is set in the late 1930s and early 1940s against the backdrop of World War II. Most of the earlier events take place in the North African desert, while the later part of the story is set in an abandoned ruined monastery a few miles from Florence, Italy. However, a nonlinear narrative structure is employed throughout, giving the film a dreamlike, enigmatic quality.
The film begins and ends with a sequence of images of a man and a woman in a two-seat biplane flying over sand dunes. A little later, the plane is shot down and explodes into flames. Everything about the plane and its occupants is a mystery that the film unravels slowly. The mystery is maintained throughout the film; what happened to the plane and its occupants is not completely revealed until the end.
The title THE ENGLISH PATIENT refers to the man in the plane who, after being rescued in the North African desert by a nomadic tribe, ends up in the caravan of a field hospital. Since he has been burned beyond recognition and he claims to be unable to remember anything, his identity cannot be established any further than a guess at his nationality based upon the sounds of his speech.
During the waning days of the war, a young Canadian nurse named Hana (Juliette Binoche) takes pity on the man and leaves her unit so she can stay with him at an isolated bombed-out monastery in Tuscany where he can die in peace. It is at the monastery that the film begins its extensive use of flashbacks. The patient is given morphine by Hana for the intense pain from his burns, and he drifts in and out of consciousness. It emerges that the patient is actually a Hungarian count named Laszlo Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), who begins to reminisce about a torrid, adulterous affair in prewar North Africa with an Englishwoman named Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). With his body broken and its pain numbed by morphine, his memory of Katherine is the only thing that still has vibrant life for him. These flashbacks are presented in a manner that is both emotionally and cinematically extremely vivid to emphasize the indelible nature of this love.
We eventually learn that Almasy's affair with Katherine unleashed a tragic chain of events that rippled through his own life and the lives of others. A man named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), whose thumbs were cut off by the Nazis, comes to the monastery to kill Almasy because he believes Almasy partially responsible for the mutilation of his hands. But after hearing Almasy's story, Caravaggio cannot bring himself to kill him. Thus the film is not only about the price that Almasy pays for passion, it is also about forgiveness.
Hana, Almasy, and Caravaggio are joined at the monastery by Kip (Naveen Andrews), a young Sikh from India who is an expert at deactivating mines and bombs. A sweet love develops between Kip and the nurse, serving as a counterpoint to the shady affair between Almasy and Katherine.
There are many good performances in this film, but I thought that the strongest belonged to Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas. Not only was their acting superb, but they had the chemistry of a great screen couple.
Ralph Fiennes gives an extraordinary performance as Count Laszlo Almasy. He portrays a man whose intellectual veneer cannot completely mask his heart's capacity for passion. What was remarkable to me was how Fiennes was able to convey such a wide spectrum of emotion using his eyes and voice when he was wearing a mask of scars.
Kristin Scott Thomas as Katherine Clifton is a self-confident femme fatale. Her intelligence and spirit are as much a part of her sex appeal as the way she looks. She is brave enough to take on the dangers of the desert, but she also betrays her husband with sang-froid.
Juliette Binoche's wonderfully expressive face is her greatest asset in this role, bringing to life the angelic compassion, child-like joy, and the spectrum of other emotions--including despair--that Hana experiences.
Naveen Andrews does a good job of portraying Kip. Like Almasy, he is a man whose cool surface covers his inner capacity for emotion. By day he defuses bombs with cool deliberation; by night he is Hana's ardent lover.
Dafoe's Carvaggio is a dangerous and mysterious man who masks his anger with a strange charm. Yet, Caravaggio is not an entirely convincing character in the movie. I think this is because he is reduced to little more than a sketch in the screenplay, rather than because of Dafoe's acting.
Colin Firth is quite good as Katherine's husband, Geoffrey Clifton. He is an affable fellow; yet when he realizes that he has become a cuckold, his face reflects a quiet fury.
Those who have read Ondaatje's novel should be forewarned that the story told in the movie differs in many ways, both large and small. The biggest difference is that the film expands the love story between the Count and Katherine, while drastically curtailing the roles of the other characters. In particular, the role of Kip is much smaller in the film than in the novel.
Although the movie is not faithful to the book from a literary point of view, it does find a cinematic equivalent to the poetic qualities of the novel: The story makes a breathtaking transition to the more visually assertive medium of film. I loved the way the wonderfully cinematic imagery worked in concert with the evocative story. From the opening sequence, this film is visually stunning. The plane flies over gracefully undulating sand dunes that resemble the curves of the human body; this visually sets the scene and foreshadows the story in a way that words alone never could. The flight over the desert sequence that begins and ends the film is dazzling; it is one of the most emotionally powerful sequences I've ever seen. And the equivalent of the novel's complexity is found in the film's visual density, with images echoing other images. For example, when Hana's lover Kip designs a device with pulleys that lift Hana up to view the frescos of the monastery by the light of flares, the opening sequence of lovers in flight is echoed.
Also, this film, like the novel, often juxtaposes both horror and lyrical beauty. One sequence where this worked particularly well was when Almasy and Katherine were caught in the sandstorm. Katherine watches the sandstorm on the horizon hovering like a shroud of fog--an image that is both gorgeous and ominous. She is oblivious to the danger until Almasy warns her and rushes her into the vehicle where they wait out the storm. While they are in the vehicle, the imminent danger brings down their emotional armor and they bond.
This is a superbly crafted and hard-hitting film that is intellectually and emotionally demanding, but I think that it is well worth the effort. Every aspect of this film is exemplary. The writer-director Anthony Minghella has created a masterpiece. This film is not light entertainment, but if you are up for a serious film, movies just don't get much better than this.
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