Review of "The English Patient"

Rating: 10/10 (16 August 2005)

Michael Ondaatje's novel (of the same name and on which the movie is based) is not the most visual of books. It is an obtuse story, yet haunting in detail, mesmerizing in its depth. Minghella brings it to the screen perfectly capturing its entire emotional content. I recall gripping the armrest of my seat almost from that drifting opening image of a biplane flying over the sensuous ripples of desert sand interspersed with shots of a hand painstakingly drawing primitive human figures with a calligraphist's brush. I was hooked and knew in those moments that this was going to be a special treat.
The movie's story is not convoluted. Nevertheless, it appears veiled. The many layers of narrative are initially hidden and are then gently and beautifully revealed. This narrational unfolding could be the re-assembling of the tortured memory of its central protagonist, Count Almasy (possibly Ralph Fiennes finest portrayal), a badly burnt, dying young man who is being cared for by a French-Canadian Allied nurse, Hana (wonderfully nuanced performance by that elegant French actress, Juliette Binoche). He lies in a large bed that seems to accentuate his frail and damaged body. This is a makeshift nursing station in an abandoned Italian monastery put together by Hana. She has volunteered to separate from her medical unit because her charge is too ill to travel further. Who is her patient? Is he English? We don't initially know. Between the Count's morphine induced ramblings and some clarity afforded by the mysterious Carvaggio (very effective turn by Willem Dafoe) who descends on this desolate pair, we begin to learn Almasy's identity and the pieces begin to fall into place. An epic tale unfolds, some from the patient's faltering memory and others from the accusative probings of Carvaggio. It is an epic tale of an obsessive forbidden romance between Almasy and Katherine Clifton, the unfulfilled wife of his Royal Geographic Expedition colleague. We are never sure of where all this takes place. It must be the Middle Eastern desert. But exactly where? Even though we are geographically lost, we know the approximate temporal position of the story. World War II is waging. Somewhere in the expanse of a great desert, perhaps in North Africa, archaeologists (Almasy being one of them) hunt for something. That something is never central to the narrative. How Almasy meets Katherine and is engulfed and convulsed by his intense attraction to her, is. They meet, they love and just as they happen to touch the highest bliss of consummation, a torrent of events deeply incises their union.
It is compelling to think that this movie is a metaphor for something. It is full of so many exquisite images and so many literary underpinnings. I believe that it is like a Greek tragedy, crushing in it's impact, embodying a deep sense of where it unfolds. In this case the irony of a Hungarian nobleman, mistaken for being English because his accent is British. The irony that he is cared for a young woman growing to love his pain, his command of facts, his quotations from Herodutus, his notes scribbled on wrinkled inserts in books that allude to his affair that is so intense that she is envious of it. In some ways, the movie is about two romances. The first is the intense physical one that resides in the English Patients memory. The second is what transpires between her and her dying patient, grotesquely burnt and unrecognizable. In that sense, The English Patient is a metaphor for how war can tear away innocence and replace it with a weary wisdom, soon to vanish