The English Patient is a tragic tale of forbidden, passionate love that is inevitably doomed. It’s an epic film filled with beautiful cinematography. It features an absolutely wonderful cast including Ralph Fiennes (the role of Count Almasy/the English Patient), Kristin Scott Thomas (the role of Katharine Clifton), Juliette Binoche (who won Best Supporting Actress for her role as Hana), and Willem Dafoe (the thumbless thief, David Caravaggio). It won 9 Oscars in 1997 at the 69th annual Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Director) – a feat only surpassed by two movies in history; Ben-Hur which won 11 awards in 1959, and West Side Story with 10 in 1961.
But despite all of this, Elaine Benes (Julia Louis Dreyfuss) from Seinfeld, when asked why she did not like the movie, replied:
“How about: ‘it sucked’?”
Every time you read something online about the English Patient, there will most likely be a reference to Elaine’s unsuppressed disdain for the movie. Why should I be any different? In all reality, most people do not like this movie and can identify with statements Elaine makes, like “Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert and DIE ALREADY!” Or, “It’s too long!” (okay, it IS 160 minutes long).
But the thing is: I really like this movie. Perhaps it’s because I read Michael Ondaatje’s extraordinary novel first, and therefore the movie made much more sense to me than it did to the average movie-goer (like Elaine) who just walked into the theatre expecting something good and only got confused. The movie jumps around to different points in time (which adds to the confusion) as the English patient starts remembering more about his role in WWII and begins recanting his stories to Hana, who is his nurse. Actually, if you understand what is going on, then this movie is excellent. Come closer – let me help you understand it more.
The movie opens with the English patient’s plane getting shot down over the desert and bursting into flames. He is then shown being rescued by desert natives who tend to his burns and take him to their village. After this short scene, we then meet Hana who is a nurse during WWII. She is immediately shown as being nurturing and motherly with all of her patients, the burned English guy being one of them.
As a caravan of military vehicles makes its trek across a dirt road, they are halted unexpectedly when they learn the hard way that they have driven into a mine field. Hana sees an abandoned church on top of a hill in the near distance and requests that her and the English patient be moved there because it will be a stationary place for him to rest. The English patient does not like to be shifted around – and would you either if your entire body was burned beyond recognition? So, Hana is granted permission to stay there and this is where the story-telling begins.
A mysterious man shows up at the church soon after Hana makes her home there, and it turns out he is David Caravaggio, a friend of her father’s and from her old neighborhood in Montreal. So, she lets him stay – probably because he seems like a nice guy from the old ‘hood, but more likely because he is missing both his thumbs and she just likes to take care of people. He wants to stay because he knows she has all the morphine he could desire for his stubby thumbs. He also knows that Hana is housing a burned Englishman, and he has his suspicions of who this patient really is. More about Caravaggio’s role in the movie shortly.
As the English patient starts telling Hana his stories, he starts remembering more and more. He remembers Katharine as being his wife, he remembers how he was an aerial mapper in the Royal Geographical Society, and that he was actually a Hungarian Count – not English at all.
What begins to unfold as his tales progress, is that Katharine was actually the wife of a fellow mapper, Jeffrey Clifton. A hot, steamy, and passionate love affair ensues between Katharine and the Count after a hiatus in the desert draws them closer to each other, no matter how hard they both fight it. The sex scenes are romantic and fiery at the same time, requiring the “R” rating. It’s like WWII porn.
The affair is soon found out by Katharine’s husband and he takes it harshly. He is to pick up the Count in the desert after another expedition, and instead tries to run him over with his plane. Jeffrey dies, Katharine is badly hurt, and the Count is unscathed. He takes her to a cave for shelter and starts his long hike across the arid desert for three days. What happens when he reaches the city and asks for help is that the English mistake him for a German, laugh at him for claiming to be a Count, and ship him off as a prisoner. This is where the Count gets medieval on their punk asses. He kills a guard on a train, jumps off, then makes his way back to the city for help. He made a promise to the woman he loves that he would not leave her in that cave, and he isn’t going to break his promise.
It is before this recant that Caravaggio begins to accuse the English patient of being a spy for the Germans. The Germans somehow had access to maps that showed them how to infiltrate their enemies, as well as pictures of Caravaggio advising the Allies. It is somehow because of the Germans’ knowledge of the maps that they knew Caravaggio was a thief/spy for the other side and it is the reason they took him as prisoner and tried to get names out of him by torturing him (cutting off his thumbs). This is the reason he does not like the English patient, and the reason he wants to kill him after he gets some answers to his questions, like: why did you kill the Cliftons and when did you go over to the Germans?
In the end – it turns out the English patient only turned over the maps to the Germans after his own countrymen denied and imprisoned him. He needed a plane to get back to the cave in the desert and the Germans gave it to him in exchange for the maps. After returning to the cave and finding Katharine dead, he loads her into the plane and takes off, which then takes us back to the first scene of the movie where his plane gets shot down. Caravaggio cannot kill the English patient now after learning this tragedy. And the English patient tells him somberly anyways: “You cannot kill me – I died years ago”.
I don’t know if there is anything to be learned from this movie, but it is a film that deeply touches me every time I watch it. It’s heartbreaking to see two people so madly in love, being torn apart because they are not supposed to be together. Even if you are not someone who is into the love story part of this film, you might just want to see it for the beautiful cinematography, which won the film an Academy Award as well. It’s a movie I recommend seeing.
And Ralph Fiennes is one fine-looking specimen of a man. Ow!
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