South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA) Cine Club on Friday screened the nine-Academy Award winning movie ‘The English Patient’ here at the SAFMA premises. For those who have forgotten the depth of romance and passion that the movies are capable of conveying, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient can remedy the situation. This is one of the most unabashed and powerful love stories of 1996, using flawless performances, intelligent dialogue, crisp camera work, and loaded glances to attain a level of emotional connection that many similar films miss.
Is The English Patient melodramatic? Of course, but it’s the sort of finely-honed melodrama that embraces viewers rather than smothering them. This well-crafted story, brought to the screen with great care by British playwright and director Anthony Minghella, and based on the prize-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje, serves up the love of Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) and Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas) in a way that is simultaneously epic and intimate.
The English Patient has an elliptical structure, beginning with the same scene that it ends with. In between, it moves several years into the future, and even further into the past. The opening sequence, which takes place during World War II, shows a British plane being shot down over the North African desert. The pilot, a Hungarian count named Laszlo Almasy, is badly burned in the ensuing crash. Years later, in 1944 Italy, we meet him again. Although his outward injuries have healed, leaving his features scarred beyond recognition, he is dying. He has also supposedly lost his memory.
Hana (Juliette Binoche), the Canadian nurse who cares for him, takes him to an isolated, abandoned church to allow him to die in peace. There, injecting him with morphine and reading to him from his beloved volume of Herodotus, Hana seeks to seeks to stimulate his memories. Meanwhile, others arrive at the church — a mysterious, crippled war veteran named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), who has a hidden agenda, and a pair of bomb experts, the British Sgt. Hardy (Kevin Whately) and his Sikh superior, Kip (Naveen Andrews), who becomes Hana’s lover. Eventually, through dreams and waking flashbacks, Almasy’s memories come flooding back, although Caravaggio asserts that he hasn’t really forgotten anything — he just wants to forget.
The story then flip-flops between the present and a period during the late-’30s and early- ‘40s, when Almasy is part of a British map-making effort surveying the Sahara. It’s then that he meets Katharine Clifton, the wife of a good-natured pilot (Colin Firth) who is helping with the project. The English Patient is the sort of intelligent, epic love story that seems so rare these days. There’s something about this film that lingers long after the end credits have rolled – a desire to re- experience all the feelings generated by the movie, perhaps. One of the reasons for The English Patient’s power is that it strikes universal chords.
