The English Patient

Plot synopsis:
Set before and during World War II, The English Patient is a story of love, fate, misunderstanding and healing. Told in a series of flashbacks, the film can best be explained by unwinding it into its two chronological phases.In the first phase, set in the late 1930s, the minor Hungarian noble Count Laszlo de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) is co-leader of a Royal Geographical Society archeological and surveying expedition in Egypt and Libya. He and his English partner Madox (Julian Wadham) are at heart academics with limited sophistication in the swirling politics of Europe and North Africa. Shortly after the film begins, both the morale and finances of their expedition are bolstered by a British couple, Geoffrey and Katherine Clifton (Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas) that joins the exploration party. The Count is taken with the gorgeous and refined Katherine. When Geoffrey is often away from the group on other matters, an affair takes wing.The final months before the war's onset bring an archaeological triumph: the Count's discovery of an ancient Saharan cave decorated with swimming figure paintings dating from prehistoric times. This period also sees the romance between Katherine and the Count rise to a sensuous peak and then seemingly fade. Katherine is plagued with the guilt of infidelity, while the Count shows a streak of jealousy along with an imbalance that will later haunt him.The fall of 1939 and the war bring all excavation at the cave to a halt, and Madox and the Count go their separate ways. Geoffrey Clifton meanwhile has pieced together the outline of the affair, and seeks a sudden and dramatic revenge: crashing his plane, with Katherine aboard, into the Count's desert camp. The wreck kills Geoffrey instantly, seriously injures Katherine, and narrowly misses the Count. He manages to take Katherine into the relative shelter of the swimming figure cave, leaves her with water, a flashlight, and a fire, then begins his scorching three day walk back to Cairo and help. The mood in British-controlled Egypt has shifted since the films start and the dazed and dehydrated Count, with his non-English name, is unable to coherently explain to officials the plane crash and Katherine's plight. Instead he loses his temper during questioning and is thrown into military jail. By the time he is able to escape and return to the cave (with German help), his Katherine is dead. And in all but a physical sense, so is the Count.The films second phase shifts to Italy and the last months of the war. The Count by now is an invalid, having been horribly burned in a plane crash of his own not long after Katherine's death. The Count is wholly dependent by this time on morphine and the care of his French-Canadian nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche), detached from her medical unit and established in a battered but beautiful Italian villa.The villa becomes focal point for more plot threads, some new and some unfinished from the North African phase, all themed around love, fate, and the backdrop of the war. Hana has seen a fiancé and a nursing friend die in the Italian campaign, and is left to wonder if her involvement with a British-Indian lieutenant will break her cycle of love and grief or simply continue it. A visitor to the villa named David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) at first believes he has simply found another source of morphine for his habit, but then realizes the disfigured Count played a role in his own ill-starred time in Egypt and Libya. For Caravaggio unwittingly stumbled into the wreckage of the Count-Katherine-Geoffrey love triangle, circa 1940-42. He's lost both thumbs in a grisly interrogation at the hands of the Nazis, and has since hunted down and killed those he believes responsible for his fate. He believes the Count was part of a web of spying and intrigue, confronts him with news of Madox's suicide, and posits that the Count killed the Cliftons. Only a full recounting at the villa of the Cliftons' crash and the Count's map dealings with the Germans to recover Katherine bring Caravaggio to understanding and forgiveness. So too does Hana find reconciliation at the film's end. Her lieutenant survives a brush with death on the war's last day and her hope in love is restored. Alas, time has run out on the Count; he succumbs to his burns and drifts off into dreams of his Katherine.

Tags: boring, murder, flashback, romantic, melodrama, tragedy, revenge, sentimental

Review:
And that's O.K. Taste is an individual thing.My sensibilities tell me that the english patient is a very good movie that takes effort to appreciate.
So many people destroyed because of the selfishness of two people couldn't(wouldn't?) control themselves.I would ask those who thought the movie boring to watch it again when you feel able to pay full attention to what's going on in the film and how different bits of dialogue dovetail into subtle suggestions of how the characters are feeling and thinking.
And thus is the situation in `The English Patient,' directed by Anthony Minghella, the story of two people who discover passion and true love in the most inopportune of places and times, proving that when it is predestined, love will find a way.It's WWII; flying above the African desert, Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) is shot down, his biplane mistaken for an enemy aircraft.
And, crippled in mind and body as he is, those memories become the only thing left to which he can cling with any hope at all, even as his life seems to be slipping farther away with each passing moment.In addition to directing, Anthony Minghella also wrote the screenplay for this film, which he adapted from the novel by Michael Ondaatje.
Nominated in twelve categories, it deservedly received a total of nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actress (Binoche) and Cinematography.If one had to choose a single word to describe the `essence' of this film, it would be `excellence.'  Even an extraordinary film, however, does not receive nine Oscars without performances that are extraordinary in kind; and the performances given by Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas here transcend the term `Oscar worthy.'  Nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal of Almasy (Geoffrey Rush was awarded the gold for `Shine'), Fiennes has never been better, achieving an emotional depth with his character that is nearly palpable.
Almasy does not seek your friendship; he will, however, gain your compassion.Kristen Scott Thomas, too, received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress (Frances McDormand received the award for `Fargo') for her portrayal of Katherine, a woman whose stoic countenance masks the emotional conflict raging within her, born of the forbidden passion that enslaves her and yet to which she gives herself willingly, casting off her shackles of repression to embrace a love so strong it threatens to consume her.
Understated and shaded with subtlety, it's terrific work by Kristin Scott Thomas.Binoche gives a stunning, affecting performance, as well, as the kindhearted nurse, Hana; it is her humanity, in fact, which defines love in it's purest sense and offers a balanced perspective of it within the context of the film.
'The English Patient' can rightly be compared to the films of David Lean, whose sweeping epics such as 'Lawrence of Arabia' and 'Bridge on the River Kwai' must have inspired the director Anthony Minghella.
I always appreciated this movie, although the genre is not my typical style (I never watched Titanic for instance, and am not planning to).The English Patient grips because it shows how people can be different when they are in an exotic environment as opposed when they are 'home' (Katherine), it shows how destructive love can be in a slow, strong and utterly painful way, it excites because of the extremely passionate affair, the pain of the one(s) who leave behind, how pointless one can feel to move on.
This difference helped me see that the film did want to show the destructive power of lust and affairs, however the fact that the central relationship was based more on lust than love took away from the emotional core of the story.The acting is almost impeccable.
Based on Canadian author Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name, 'The English Patient' is a touching meditation on life, love and loss, tracing the history of a critically-burnt man in the aftermath of World War Two.During the war, a man (Ralph Fiennes) is discovered in the burning remnants of a crashed plane.
With his face scarred beyond recognition, and with the man seemingly suffering from amnesia, he is assumed to be an Allied soldier, and is simply referred to as "the English patient." After the war, in the mine-ridden hills of Italy, a kind nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), who has apparently lost everybody close to her, remains in a ruined monastery to look after the dying man.
Cinematographer John Seale captures the landscape to perfection; not since David Lean's magnificent 'Lawrence of Arabia' has a film shown the desert with such beauty and grandeur, making particularly good use of sweeping aerial shots from Almásy's plane.
Even in the film's more intimate moments, excellent use of close-ups and lighting capture the emotion of the scene, coupled, of course, with the brilliant performances from all the cast members.A long-time favourite actor of mine, 'The English Patient' might just contain Ralph Fiennes' finest performance, and, considering his history includes such films as 'Schindler's List' and 'The Constant Gardener,' this is not a complement that is to be taken lightly.
I want the things which are mine, which belong to me."Juliette Binoche, who received an Oscar for her performance here, is excellent as Hana, the lonesome nurse who fears to love because of the tragedies that have always harmed those close to her.
However, due to her past history, Hana is afraid that becoming involved with Kip will doom him to death, particularly considering his very dangerous line of work.At 160 minutes in length, 'The English Patient' wonderfully evokes memories of the classic romantic epics of old, successfully finding a balance of mystery, love, joy and tragedy.
You wont regret it if you like romance and love story's and beautifully crafted films..
He produced a filmic transliteration that not only had no respect for story's metaphors but no apparent cognizance of them, as well.Minghella took the central focus away from Hana and Kip and put it on the Patient and Katherine Clifton, thereby missing the narrative trail of the novel as well as the "essence" of it.Ralph Fiennes and Kristen Scott Thomas put in unengaging, uninspiring, uninvolving, unemotional performances that were obviously intended to convey a great, driving, passionate love-affair to the viewer, but which in fact delivered only an inexplicable, perfunctory liaison between two flat, shallow, uninteresting adulterers.
Both actors are physically and emotionally inadequate and unexciting, and neither performance provided the viewer with the great emotional response obviously intended by Minghella's grandiose and overblown presentation.The "grand, sweeping, David-Lean-like" qualities to which the many undiscriminating reviewers of this goofy film love to refer simply is not there.
One can only thank God that even the hype-driven Acadamyhad the good sense to present the Best Actress award to Frances McDormand for her truly deserving performance in the truly excellent film, "Fargo." There was not a single performance in the execrable "English Patient" that was not either embarrassingly horrid over-acting (Willem Dafoe) or truly forgettable, mediocre acting (Fiennes and Scott Thomas).
Not that I have anything against sudden bouts of sex or against innocent perversion, but please if you're making a pretentious movie make sure that you don't depict it as True Love.Conclusion: The images are professional but the film is emotionally very twisted, and the music was disgusting.
despite a few flaws, "The English Patient" proves itself as an enthralling modern-day epic with that same sweeping sense that made movies like "Lawrence of Arabia".
One of the most charming and, for me at least, the most powerful elements of Anthony Minghella's enthralling Best Picture-winner "The English Patient" is that, in the mid 90s, when Hollywood was in the initial stage of having lost its nerve for grand new projects, a film was created that brought back traces—very powerful traces—of the sweeping, wonderful majesty that crafted movies such as "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) and "The Ten Commandments" (1956).
It has that glorious feeling, a stretched running time that hardly seems long at all, and fascinating characters with pasts and stories."The English Patient", based on a novel by the same name by Michael Ondaatje, is like "The Godfather: Part II" (1974) in the sense of how it's constructed.
It's a blending of two stories: the past and the present and it all revolves around the titular character: an English patient in the post years of World War Two. Ralph Fiennes plays the English patient, who has been scarred for life by a plane crash, and being taken care of in an isolated church by a single nurse played marvelously by Juliette Binoche.
Apart from bonding with her raspy-voiced, troubled patient, Binoche comes to learn about his past when a stranger (Willem Dafoe) arrives and the two men appear to know each other.That's just one of the two beautifully crafted stories that shape this film.
What I really admired about the love story between Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas was how passionate, how obsessive, how enchanting it was shown on screen.
It was a tough movie to get made given, as director Minghella says, that its star was burned beyond recognition in a bed, remembering things about Europe and the War, and it was to be directed by a film-maker who had never done anything on this scale before.
In "Casablanca," the movie this piece of garbage is most often compared do, the moral is, "fighting the evil of Naziism is more important than romance." This film takes the opposite tack- who cares if Hitler conquers the world, as long as love prevails!EVen if this movie weren't 3 hours long and dull as dishwater, that would be a repugnant message..
It's basically a woman's movie.As a man, I enjoyed watching the beautiful Juliette Binoche, who plays a nurse who takes care of the burned Fiennes, whose scarred body, frankly, is interesting to view.
Binoche has an affair with an Indian man and the highlight of that romance is when he hoists her aloft on a harness to see paintings high up on a church wall.Fiennes, Thomas and Willem Dafoe all played unlikeable characters to me and didn't make the film worth giving it a third look.
What we get, instead of a character study of deeply insightful, 10-dimensional characters, is a romanticized dick-fest of Ralph Fiennes and what's-her-face(whoever played The English Patient's love interest) hamming up the screen with their unimportant love story.Some may consider it bad form to not even attempt to figure out the whore's name, but people who focus on the Patient and his affair, such as the director, are morons who completely missed the point of the novel.
Another mistake the director made was turning Hana, Kip, and Caravaggio into 1-dimensional characters with absolutely no purpose in the movie but to listen to The Patient's story and make puppy-dog faces.One would assume that after reading the poetic verses, and fully absorbing the bleak outlook of the novel, that the atmosphere would easily come to a creative director who would translate the dead atmosphere of the book to a visual journey into the psyches of those affected by the war, but instead we get a myopic excuse for a film that seems like the director had a creative writing class in high school taught by a complete idiot who photo-copies digest magazines in his spare time between marking perfects on assignments of people who he favours and watching lame sci-fi shows.The utter carelessness and lack of attention towards the main themes of the novel, and the failure to present the deep characters and glorious atmosphere of the novel is so anger-inducing that i'm barely able to write a coherent review.
It makes me reminisce about a creative writing teacher who would probably go to this movie and enjoy every moment of it because of its ability to adhere to the "10 steps to directing a good movie" crap that the establishment tries to feed people because they're too damn dumb to think beyond affairs, love and romance.If I could rate this lower than a 1 I'd probably go into imaginary numbers or decimals.
I certainly believe in the right to free speech but come on people.The English Patient is a story of love between two people brought together by WWII.I was immersed throughout and brought to the brink of tears at the end.The story and sub plots revolve around a man and a woman who fall in love and the consequences of their actions due to this.A film with murderous jealousy and revenge.
And then some where around the two hour mark a declaration of love and the movie explodes with emotion...This is great film making.But its so mannered that its tough to get through.Frankly I like the movie better than the book.
In most ways the two are equal tellings of the same story, however I would be hard pressed to ever pick up the book again.If you can wait for a pay off and like romantic movies then by all means see this wondrous film.
I did like the character played by Binoche, and I did care what happened to her and Andrews' character, but this relationship was barely touched on in the movie, though I understand it is more important in the book.
But the movie is still worth seeing for what it pulls off best: high romance, great drama, and another version of true love on the screen..
There are essentially four stories going on at any time during the movie: the flashbacks of a dying man, his relationship with the woman who is caring for him, a nurse's attempt to love someone without them dying, and a man with no thumbs looking to get revenge for what happened to him.
I am by no means romantic, at least I dont go to cinema "looking for a movie to cry with", but believe me, the English Patient turns you into a state of sensibility that makes you realize the beauty of feelings, not only the happy ones, but the sad ones too.
I can understand why it might try someone's patience, as the pace is very slow and perhaps purposefully so and the film is very long at over two-and-a-half hours, but I do think it is unfair that there are those who consider one of the worst Best Picture winners(I personally think Crash, Cimarron, Braveheart and The Hurt Locker are worse, I have never understood the hate for Shakespeare in Love either as in my opinion that's better than the movie-Saving Private Ryan- that almost everyone says should have beat it).
The film also has a poetic and thought-provoking script, a compelling story that conveys the characters' predicaments wonderfully complete with flashbacks that enhance rather than jar and superb direction by the late and very talented Anthony Minghella.The English Patient has a strong emotional impact as well, the climatic sequence in particular moved me to tears that stayed long after the movie was over.
The acting does perfect justice to these characters, Ralph Fiennes is absolutely brilliant in one of his best and more complex performances(I'd say only Schindler's List is better), and Kristen Scott Thomas shows a great chemistry with him, the scene where she is carried out of the cave by him is one of extreme pathos.
This is a long slow movie, which gradually reveals the story around the fatal end of the lead characters' romance.
Overly long, and utterly predictable, "The English Patient" fails in its attempt to create an enjoyable movie but failing to make its audience care about the cardboard characterscreated by the un-Oscar worthy Anthony Minghella.
Minghella also brings out a magnificent screenplay with some memorable quotes.The English Patient is a movie rich with every ingredient a serious film should have -- cinematography, original music, make-up, good script and of course, acting.
This is one of my all time favorite movies and I can watch it a hundred times more, and still not get bored (I won't really do that) because I understand the meaning of this film.
Remember that episode of 'Seinfeld' where the characters decide to see 'The English Patient' and everyone thinks it is the best film ever made except for Elaine, and they cannot believe that she did not like it.
And despite the long running time of the movie, all the characters remain remarkably 'flat'.The love story is rather pathetic and unbelievable.
There were far too many shots where we apparently were supposed to gush at the scenery, time which could have been spent on, say, the relationship between Binoche and Andrews, or one making Kristin Scott Thomas' character seem less shallow.I cannot understand how this movie got nominated for best picture, never mind how it won.
Even though I absolutely hated this movie it does have a few good things about it.1) Excellent music - I personally believe Marta Sebestyn has a beautiful voice.2) The scenes shot in the desert were beautiful (but overdone)3) One of my favorite actors, Ralph Fiennes, is in it (but I do forgive him for that)But even though those things were good, I hate this film with a passion and I give kudos to the Seinfeld episode where Elaine doesn't understand why people love this movie.
An excellent movie with all the good things about the "The English Patient" with an exception of the desert.
And if you want to see a good movie directed by Anthony Minghella see "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (even though its adaptation was far from faithful to the book.) Or you could watch a slug race because it has the same pace of "The English Patient" and just about as much excitement..
Just her expressions in the interaction with Fiennes in the movie did her character complete justice.I just love the way Kristin Scott Thomas (Katherine) plays her roles.
The English Patient is a love story between two people who have no chemistry.
Or Lawrence of Arabia.Who should see this film:-- People who love romance stories-- Arty types.
Some of the best movies ever made were love stories.