'The English Patient' revisited

Second take

I recently revisited The English Patient and found that after these many years it still remains one of the most unabashedly romantic things you can feast your
eyes (and your sensibilities!) on. 

Anthony Minghella’s unfaithful adaption of Michael Ondaatje’s modern classic turns out to be more faithful to the book’s many beguiling pleasures than a strictly faithful rendering. Its beauty is perhaps beyond words — even beyond  the words of the book whose ‘poetry of smoke and mirrors’ finds substance here. In one exquisite frame after another Minghella lights up (and darkens) Ondaatje’s images of piercing loveliness.

Like some grand jigsaw puzzle that is finally coming together, the plot unfolds languorously (at 2 hours, 39 minutes) flitting between two love stories back and forth in time. The first is set in 1939 in Cairo and the deserts of North Africa and involves Count Laszlo Amasy (Ralph Fiennes), an intense, brooding cartographer working for the Royal Geographical Society, and Katharine Clifton, an elegant, dashing Englishwoman.

The second is set in the waning days of WWII in a Tuscan monastery in Italy and involves a numb, grieving but radiant nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche) and Kip (Naveen Andrews), a British Sikh who defuses land mines. The clue to how these two stories will resolve lies with the English patient, a burn victim (obsessed by love and literally consumed in a fire) disfigured beyond recognition who does not remember anything, not even his own name.

The English Patient’s anguished romanticism is all the more absolute for being shrouded in fatality and doom. I’ve long had a special place for Anthony Minghella’s first film, Truly, Madly, Deeply, as enchanting a romantic comedy as you’ll ever see — but even that one had dark corners in it. And even here, Minghella darkens the romance until the point where the lover says to his beloved: “Every night I cut my heart out and in the morning it is full again.”

“There are stories the man recites quietly into the room which slips from level to level like a hawk,” writes Ondaatje in the novel, referring to the scarred man who cannot remember his name but knows all the stories that is worth knowing. And Minghella’s non-linear narrative swoops from one set of lovers to another, from the “contours of the body to the topography of the desert”.

The desert becomes a character in the film, and how indelibly it has been photographed by John Seale: whether it is sweeping landscapes like rippled sand dunes, the shadow of a bi-pane gliding on the sand, white sand storms rising up like waves, cave drawings in the dark, religious paintings lit up by flares, the market places of Cairo, Tuscan countryside or intimate, iconic close-ups of, say, an old book (by Herodotus) stuffed with mementoes, the hollow of a woman’s neck just under the throat, a hand steadily painting in black overtones as the titles appear, a beautiful handwriting in pitch dark on a fragment of paper that says, “we die, we die”, or a thumb as it is cut off, blood spurting or a crescent moon in the desert... all of it is sensually recorded.

Haunting us is also Gabriel Yared’s music score with its Hungarian folk song and performances, specially the two women: Juliette Binoche has a simplicity that is luminous here, and the beautiful, intelligent Kristin Scott Thomas. The English Patient fuses geography, the mystery of far-flung places and wartime espionage with consuming physical love.

 “The heart”, the film informs us, “is an organ of fire.” And few films have come this close to showing us why this is so. Anthony Minghella was only 54 when he died (March 2008), having just completed a television adaptation of The No 1. Ladies Detective. When I first heard of his death, I immediately asked Pico Iyer for his feelings and thoughts about this loss to cinema. I knew Pico held a special place for Minghella. One of the questions I asked him was about his own discovery of The English Patient.

And he wrote to say, “I found myself going back to the cinema again and again to see The English Patient more times now than I can count. And in the scene of Hana swinging from the rafters of an old church, as she takes in ancient frescoes by the light of a flare, there is a mix of wonder, of romance, of ancient setting and modern invention, that not only catches what is most transcendent in Ondaatje, but serves as an abiding image of what love or art or even the simple principle of flight and lift-off can do to the human soul.

No artiste in any genre has caught the dialogue of lovers with as much maturity and quirky immediacy as Minghella — and he made the relationship between partners seem one of life’s great adventures.”