Gibran’s passionate says “Beauty is a thing of might and dread. Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and sky above us”. For Socrates “Beauty is on a par with Goodness and Truth in the trinity of perfect Ideas.” Love is yearning for this beauty; it is the poet’s elation, the artist’s revelation, the musician’s inspiration. Anthony Minghella’s epic The English Patient explores love like no other modern day movie has, heart burning with raw passion, mind befuddled about right and wrong. The moral boundaries get blurred; love sometimes is incompatible with morality. The English Patient is no Romeo-Juliet tale; the forbidden fruit status of Katherine Clifton lends the classical tragedy touch to the movie. Michael Ondaatje’s captivating novel had won the Booker prize in 1992. Minghella brings all the lyrical prose into the screen, keeping the audience enthralled in his 160 minute long love saga.
The movie starts in 1943; a British plane flying over the Sahara is brought down by German anti-aircraft machineries. The pilot is rescued by Bedouins, his “organs are packing up.”; he is “a bit of toast”. Horribly burnt and amnesiac from the accident, the patient is passed over to the Allied authorities; the English patient had arrived. The patient is taken care off by a Canadian nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche). Hana persuades her seniors to let her stay with the patient is a deserted villa. The young Hana’s loving affection helps the patient to recall events from his past; drifting sporadically between his memories of the desert. He was a desert-based archaeologist, a Hungarian, Count Laszlo Almasy, whose reticence doesn’t give an insight to the passion burning in the man. When a fellow adventurer of the Royal Geographic society, Geoffrey Clifton arrives in the desert one day with his beautiful wife Katherine, Almasy is not exactly elated. Katherine greets him “I wanted to meet the man who could write such a long paper with so few adjectives”. Almasy brushes her off “A thing is a thing, no matter what you put in front of it; small car, broken car, still a car”.
In the Italian villa where they had put up, Hana tries to recover from the recent death of her boyfriend. Dosed up by morphine the Count goes on ruminating memories from the past. The seemingly taciturn Hungarian is swept by a fervor; call it love or infatuation; for Katherine. “The heart is an organ of fire”, the Count writes later. Soon the duo is dancing together, much to the ire of Geoffrey.
In the villa, passers by drop every other day. One of them is Kip, a Sikh who is serving in the British army. The young Hana develops tenderness to this soldier and their love accentuates between the long flashbacks of the Count’s love tale. Another visitor is David Caravaggio, a thief who worked for the Italian resistance during the war. Caravaggio seems to know more about the patient than anyone else. Hana is content with her patient sailing in the seas of his remembrance; Caravaggio seems like a man on a mission to dig out some unhappy truths about the count.
The English Patient is a soul-stirring tragedy that goes directly for your tear ducts. Ondaatje’s novel itself is a piece of classic fiction and the lyricism is expressively translated into the screen. The most striking aspect is the photography; never has the desert looked so beautiful after Lawrence of Arabia. But John Seale’s Sahara is much more feminine, its beauty doesn’t burn, rather it soothes. With such a magnificent backdrop, the camera just gently caresses the actors, capturing their mood through their eyes. The background score by Gabriel Yared is a winner all the way; alternating between the melancholic and the ecstatic embodying the pain and bliss that every heart in the movie harbours.
The acting is Oscar caliber and uniformly high. Few actors today can match Fiennes’ intensity. He is reticent; Katherine complains “You speak so many bloody languages, and you never want to talk”. The hallmark of great actors is that they can talk through eyes. Brando’s brittle sad face turned American cinema upside down, Pacino’s eyes were enough to convey his Corleonesque charm. Fiennes rarely talks as Almasy “I am a bit rusty at social graces”; yet you can feel his sweltering desire for Katherine. Kristin Scott Thomas is sensual and intelligent, carefully nuancing her way from eroticism to intellect. Juliette Binoche is cute as the nurse Hana, but her role is not fully realized by the script.
The English Patient evokes one word: passion. Morally, its not pristine love. The movie portrays passion in all its terrifying reality. When you sit down to analyze whether their love was wrong and hence reprehensible, you get a gentle yes from within. When you ask yourself whether their love was sublime, the consent gets stronger. “Beyond happiness and unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity”, wrote Paz. The lovers in the movie had gone mad in their adulterous affair, yet they were courageous enough to defy society. In one of the scenes, Katherine slaps Laszlo hard, and then takes him into her arms; she does not want to taste the forbidden pleasure but in the depth of her heart she is unwilling to resist it.
The English Patient is moving experience that carries us across the expanses of the Sahara to the serene Italian countryside, from the dark alleys of man’s desire to the radiant realm of love. Dying on his bed, the Count remembers his beautiful Katherine. “Sail your smile into the air; it will reach and enliven me! Breathe your fragrance into the air; it will sustain me”. You have got to see it to feel the yearning for love. It rates as the best love saga after Casablanca
