The English Patient (1996)

When I first saw The English Patient, Oscar's Best Picture of 1996, I wasn't really impressed. It seemed like an uneven attempt at blending Out of Africa and Lawrence of Arabia, two movies I love. I remember walking out of the theater talking to my Partner at the Time about the love story that is the primary focus of the narrative and wondering why it was less than involving for me as a viewer. Watching it again recently, I understood better how repressed both Count Laszlo de Almasy and Katharine Clifton are. Seeing their love develop gradually was a more haunting experience for me this time, and I think I can see why this film has been so loved by so many people, including Academy voters who gave it nine awards that year.

The film begins with the crash in the African desert of a plane piloted by Almsay (Ralph Fiennes). He is severely burned in the crash and is kept alive by nomadic people who carry him through the desert on camels to the care of the Canadian nurse. The nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), has been consistently unlucky in love during the war, having experienced the deaths of at least two of her lovers. Turning her back on further romances, she decides to devote all of her energy to keeping Almsay alive. She takes up residence with him in an abandoned monastery so that he no longer has to suffer the constant moving that the all of the battles of World War II demand. In essence, she decides to stay with him until he dies.

While lying in his bed, Almsay (a Hungarian who was mistakenly dubbed the "English patient" because his identity cannot be determined but he was flying an English plane) begins to drift in and out of consciousness, remembering in flashbacks the love affair that he had with Katharine (a radiant Kristin Scott Thomas) while serving as a mapmaker in Africa with the Royal Geographic Society prior to and during the early years of the war. Katharine is, of course, already married to one of Almsay's fellow society members, Colin Firth's Geoffrey Clifton, so she and Almsay must deny their feelings for each other for a long period of time. It's a sandstorm which traps them in a truck for a night that allows them to begin to express themselves to each other.

Simultaneously, in the "present day" story, a pickpocket named David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) shows up at the monastery, looking for the man who betrayed him and led the Germans to cut off his thumbs. Also appearing is a group of soldiers who specialize in clearing roads and fields of mines and bombs. For an abandoned monastery, it gets a lot of foot traffic. One of those men is Kip, a Sikh played by Naveen Andrews, now more familiar to viewers of TV's Lost. Kip and Hana begin a love affair of their own, one that causes Hana to be nervous about his fate, particularly given her recent history with men.

However, despite all of those events, it's the moments between Fiennes and Thomas that resonate the most in this film. There are some lovely scenes between the two of them. They have sex while troops outside in a courtyard are singing "Silent Night"; it's one of the sexiest moments in film from the past quarter century, made all the more sexy because of the danger of being caught so easily. He falls in love with the area at the base of her throat, that little indention called the "suprasternal notch," as Almsay finds out from one of his friends. He buys her a thimble in the market at Cairo, and then he sees her wearing it later in the film. That's when she delivers perhaps the most romantic lines in the film: "Of course, you idiot. I always wear it. I've always worn it. I've always loved you." It's all pretty heady stuff. Both stars are at their most beautiful (if I can say that about Fiennes, and I think I can), and you can see quite a contrast between Almsay as the lonely cartographer and as the English patient, not the least of which is make-up that looks like a test run for his face as Voldemort in those Harry Potter movies. Yet even under all of that make-up, Fiennes manages to convey the sense of loss that Almsay feels.

I won't lie and say that I love this movie after having watching it again. There are still some things I'm not fond of, touches by the writer or the director that just seem a little too geared to drawing praise. I'm thinking, for example, of the way that the parachute is draped around Katharine as Almsay takes her into the cave; I must say that is one artfully arranged parachute to allow for such movement in the wind. The movie just calls attention to its own beauty too many times for my complete satisfaction. That said, I am grateful for the chance to re-evaluate it. The English Patient won over Fargo and Secrets & Lies in 1996, and now I at least understand and can appreciate why.