How did this junk win ten Oscars?

Rating: 4/10 (23 October 2014)

Then there was THE English PATIENT. There had been a lot of partisan conflict pro and con over THE English PATIENT. It won no less than ten Oscars including Best Picture. Yet there were some who complained bitterly. There was an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine grows exasperated at her friends and colleagues mooning over the film to the point where her boss insists on taking her to see the film and while he sits there teary eyed she squirms in her seat and just shouts out "Die already!"
Everyone is aghast at Elaine's reaction as they sit teary eyed, overwhelmed by the romance. But what is the romance? It's nothing more than our old friend infidelity, except here it's clothed in the veddy veddy colonial carryings on in Cairo and the western desert in the period before WW2. Falling in love by campfire light while reading Herodotus. Oh please. It reminds me of love scenes in movies where we're assured that it all takes place on 800 thread count sheets. It's making love. I always seem to hear the gravelly voice of Henry Miller saying, "Don't you mean f**king?"
Of course the story is told in flashbacks. Now usually flashbacks are a narrative devise used to reveal the plot non-sequentially. But here the use of flashbacks is merely to draw out this basic story of infidelity and revenge for more than two hours. It's like one of those $500 hamburgers. It's got wagyu beef and truffles but it's still a hamburger.
If it were taking place in a Bronx tenement it would all be over in half an hour. It would be just another double murder/suicide. But with everybody downing gin and tonics at the club and a bit of the old scholars shuffle in colonial offices, it presents a certain retro romanticism (at least as far as furnishings and accessories go) which is beyond the experience of the audience but which they want to believe existed. I've been to these places and people are so bored that adultery is the rule rather than the exception. There's nothing else to do but to screw each other's wives and when that grows tiresome to have a bash at the local brothels. A steady flow of tourists is a bit too much to be hoped for.
Tits and ass with class Lenny Bruce would call it. This drawing things out reminds me of reality TV or the quiz programs which tease before they say the answer is right and we'll get to see something we're promised after some adverts. This is why Elaine became so frustrated.
Of course the action, while filled with incident, is patently absurd. First of all, it doesn't pass my Lady Bracknell test. One suicide by bi-plane can only be regarded as a misfortune. But two suicides by bi-plane suggests carelessness. Just a little gold flake on our burger.
Then there's the part where our hero walks three days through the desert to bring back some help for his love that he leaves battered and bleeding in a cave. He finally makes it to the British outpost. Somehow in between the first bi-plane suicide and our hero's arrival WW2 has broken out and instead of raising the alarm and getting help for his lady love, he is interned. The interment is done by a sergeant major. Now they may be the backbone of the British Army but they do not have the authority to arrest and intern people willy-nilly. If someone walked into town from the desert and there was anything suspicious about him, he would have to be debriefed by Intelligence, which would have meant he would have been interrogated by an officer. Once he met an officer they would have matched up friends in Cairo and help would be on the way.
The fact that he had a foreign name would have meant little because obviously he was a gentleman. There was a similar incident in WW I where a British spy was found in the Sinai with the name Meinertzhagen and he turned out to be a British Officer (see the incident in The Lighthorsemen). So, no British Sergeant Major was likely to assume the authority of an officer in interning a foreign gentleman whatever his name or nationality was.
But OK, lets move on.
When our hero is interred and escapes it's the first days of the war. The Afrika Korps arrived in early 1941. What had he been doing until then? He delivers his maps to them in exchange for a bi-plane that had previously been squirreled away. Hadn't he returned to the cave in the year and a half of freedom? So he too smashes into the desert with horrible burns. He is rescued and brought to a British medical unit.
Now this gets me. Instead of sending him on to an equipped hospital in Tobruk or Alexandria or Cairo even, they schlepp him through the loss of Tobruk, the victory at El Alamein, the landings in Sicily, the fight up the Italian boot to wind up in Florence (champagne for the burger?). He's a burn patient after all and they hold on to them moving him around from battle to battle for four years. Not sending him to a hospital. Seems a bit incredible. Seems insane.
Thus the other reason for the flashback structure–time makes no sense here. On the Wikipedia page for the novel it's categorized as "meta fiction". I know Borges was able to freeze a bullet in time to give a philosopher about to be executed time to finish his work. But that was exactly what the story was "about". Here time means nothing. It's just something to be dipped into to supply incident and drama. Its crudely manipulative, exposed by its distortion of any logic, by its deliberate defiance of verisimilitude.