Anthony Minghella's most famous film is worth re-watching

Rating: 8/10 (1 April 2008)

The unexpected death of the English film director and screenwriter Anthony Minghella in March 2008 prompted me to re-watch his greatest triumph on DVD again. It's a curious film which has as many detractors as admirers. 'The English Patient' was released in 1996 and won nine Oscars (including Best Director for Minghella) and six British Academy Awards (including Best Adapted Screenplay for Minghella).
Filmed on location in Italy and Tunisia, with a mostly British cast (Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, Naveen Andrews, Julian Wadham, Kevin Whatley) plus the French Juliette Binoche and the American William Dafoe - 'The English Patient' confirms Minghella as the most literary and romantic of English filmmakers - his movies are considerably distanced from any kind of reality. Often compared to David Lean, this film mixes elements of 'Brief Encounter' (adultery accompanied by classical piano concertos) and 'Lawrence of Arabia' (a passion for the desert). John Seale's camera and Stuart Craig's quite remarkable production design conjure up two remote and distant worlds. The first is the North African deserts in 1938/39, where Count Almasy (Fiennes) and the English couple Geoffrey and Katherine Clifton (Firth and Thomas) are members of the International Sand Club, a group of explorers mapping the desert. Almasy begins an ill-fated affair with Clifton's wife.
In 1945, Almasy is the anonymous 'English patient', bed-ridden and disfigured by an air crash. He spends his days in an abandoned Italian monastery being cared for by a French Canadian nurse called Hana (Binoche). Also there is a morphine addicted allied spy called Carravagio (Dafoe) and two British Army bomb disposal men (Andrews and Whatley). The monastery gives a sense of an awkward end of World-War 2 meeting point of various races and nationalities: Eastern European, Canadian, Sikh and British.
But this description affords Minghella's screenplay a linear clarity which isn't there. We constantly cut between the North African and Cairo of 1938/39 and the Italy of 1945. The late 30s become a place of Almasy's memories, where he retreats to in his final frail dying days. The opening and closing shots of the film are both the same - Almasy's final flight in a bi-plane containing Katherine's body. Geoffrey - grief stricken by the knowledge of his wife's betrayal - tried to kill the three of them by crashing his bi-plane. Almasy had to leave the injured Katherine a desert cave whilst he walked across the desert for help. Eventually, all he can do is give the German army the maps of the desert in exchange for a bi-plane to go and rescue Katherine. She is, of course, long dead.
Best of all, Minghella brings consistently good performances from the entire cast. Twentieth Century Fox didn't want Kristin Scott Thomas for the Katherine role in The English Patient - they wanted Demi Moore. And without her, Fox withdrew from the film (it was eventually financed by Miramax). Minghella's loyalty to Scott Thomas was not only rewarded by her Oscar and BAFTA nominations, but by the fact it's impossible to imagine very many actresses conveying Katherine's luminous beauty and intelligence in the same way - it makes us understand why her husband Geoffrey (Colin Firth) would kill himself on becoming so engulfed with grief and jealousy on discovering her affair with Almasy. Is she England's most beautiful actress? There's an astonishing scene when we see her full frontal nude getting out of a bath - a thirty-something blonde just oozing sex and charm. It's hard not to feel saddened when she dies alone in the desert cave.
'The English Patient' is a complex novel and Minghella's adaptation of the book is a version of it. Give the same book to, say, Ronald Harwood or Christopher Hampton, and a very different adaptation might emerge. It's hard not to still admire Minghella's screen craft as a director, even when you're bored and confused by the leaps in time. He includes a gripping set-piece of Kip attempting to defuse a bomb beneath a bridge which threatens to be detonated by rumble of on-coming Allied tanks. He handles the period atmosphere quite magnificently, the atmosphere of worn and war-torn oldness in 1945, of stillness, space and heat in the monastery and desert, something which gives these characters a chance to speak, to be heard, to emote in their own space - all without distraction. The atmosphere so engulfs you that upon emerging from the viewing you feel you're emerging back into reality.