A WORLD AT WAR



By Pat Dowell
Army Times
Vol. 57, Issue 20
Rest & Relaxation: Film Clip
December 9, 1996
Private side of war shown in lush, complex film The English Patient (3 1/2 stars)





In the waning days of World War II in Italy, a war-weary nurse leaves an Allied convoy to tend to a dying patient. She finds refuge for them in a ruined monastery, and listens while the man known as "the English patient" gradually spins the tale of how his world fell apart.

That is the unusual plot of the movie based on Canadian author Michael Ondaatje's 1992 best seller that won the prestigious Booker Prize and was considered unfilmable because of its lush, poetic language. British writer-director Anthony Minghella tried anyway, and has produced a haunting film of staggering beauty, performed by a cast not just of celebrities, but of real actors.

Ralph Fiennes, who played the cruel Nazi commandant in Schindler's List, is the title character in this voluptuously romantic tragedy. He gives a performance of fine intensity and wit. He spends much of the movie inside several pounds of hideous makeup that simulates the look of fatal burns, but he's marvelously expressive all the same.

As the patient's memories unfold, the movie visits his past to find he's not an Englishman at all but a Hungarian count named Almazy, who was part of a geographical expedition in the African desert in the late '30s -- the International Sand Club, these wealthy Europeans called themselves.

Almazy fell in love with the wife of one of his colleagues. Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) and he indulged in a mad passion in the past, while in the patient's bleak present, his nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) listens and eases his pain, and falls in love herself with a Sikh soldier named Kip (Naveen Andrews), who dismantles bombs for the British Army.

The two love stories, one dying and one being born, twine round each other to form this odd and compelling story, which shows how war both forges and shatters love and friendship.

Adding some tension to this isolated little group in the midst of a combat zone is a mysterious man named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), who thinks he knows more than anyone about the English patient. He has a grudge that demands revenge.

The movie almost captures the novel's gorgeous descriptive power in its eerily beautiful views of the desert and of Tuscany. Its opening scenes are among the most exquisite sights on the screen this year -- a plane files over dunes that resemble mounds of flesh, the little plane is filled with oddly dreamy occupants, and all this is filled out with the mysterious sound of a woman singing.

When the film comes round to some of those images again at the end of the story, they are achingly beautiful for now having their mysteries solved. The little inexplicable things that puzzled us are now tragically clear.

Fiennes and Thomas make a terrifically grown-up pair of lovers, and their scenes together express a mature sort of intimacy that is rare in movies. Director Minghella is just as adept with the supporting players, particularly Colin Firth as Katharine's bewildered husband. His deep sadness and anger precipitate a tragedy that is rounded off with senseless cruelty by the wartime prejudices of strangers.

The film, like the novel, has an extraordinary sense of place. From Cairo and Tobruk to the hills of Tuscany, The English Patient is an eye-popping thing to see. There is scene after scene of glorious light-filled visions.

The spectacular sandstorm that buries a car is unforgettable, but so is the brittle smartness of international high society in Cairo, and the magnificent rubble of the monastery, its frescoes illuminated by flares.

The English Patient is rated R (contains sexual situations, some nudity, some violence, including a brief but disturbing scene of Gestapo torture).


 

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