EveryBestPicture.com revisits this Oscar Best Picture winner All love is powerful, Hollywood has long exploited this. It sells this particular strain by the bucketload: a romantic love that knows no bounds and is limited by no earthly constraints. The English Patient is one of the most perfect expressions of this kind of love. This man (Almásy, played by Ralph Fiennes) and woman (Katharine Clifton, played by Kristin Scott Thomas) find themselves in a situation which needs no further complication. She is married to another, WWII is breaking out around them and they spend most of their time in crocked vehicles with dwindling water supplies in the deepest of deserts hoping that they will be rescued sooner rather than too late. But they do fall in love. That much you can see from the poster. It is as if Jane Austen and Rudolf Valentino collided, creating something new, but old. Somehow, innocence and good sense had been left out of the mix. Our two protagonists show neither of these qualities in any great abundance and as a result the fireworks fly, a marriage implodes and the devil may care. I can't say that I warmed to either one of them- but that doesn't seem to matter to me. Both are rich- he is a count, she is landed gentry. Both have lives of excess and folly, champagne camping trips, events in evening dresses and tuxedos, but also manage to take themselves terribly seriously. They are not used to having to earn anything, to having to wait for what they want. If it weren't for the fact that she falls for him, that the feelings are mutual, you are left with little doubt that his sense of entitlement to her by virtue of the fact that he loves her utterly and completely would not just be creepy (as it sometimes comes across), but dangerous. He has little compunction in letting her know that he has rights to her, that she should relent, and she does. His somewhat single minded view of how she should spend her time is, fortunately, shared. His willingness to do anything to see her again leads him to provide maps to Rommel's Nazi desert troops enabling a massacre of thousands. All in the name of his love for her. However, this portrait of a love which leaves a trail of destruction across North Africa is countered by another tale woven into the film, a tale of two simpler people who seek nothing material (Naveen Andrews plays Kip, Juliette Binoche as Hana). Their love hurts no one, but hanging above them is an ever approaching double-bladed sword of Damocles: everyone she loves dies, and he is a bomb disposal expert who spends his days defusing booby traps and unexploded ordinance. The English Patient is sumptuously shot. To make it this far into a review without mentioning this, or comparing it to Lawrence of Arabia (as lazy as it may seem, with both set in the desert) is absurd. But it is to the film's credit that the beauty is complementary, not central. The power of this film lies in the worlds created by the director (Anthony Minghella): utterly convincing. You willingness to believe is enhanced by the central performances, the intimacy between Fiennes & Scott Thomas is particularly striking. There is so much going for this movie, and it stood out so considerably from the other films of the mid nineties, I can understand why when it came to voting for 'Best Picture' the members of the Academy would have thought to themselves that this had the edge, and posted their ballot accordingly. It distils Hollywood's obsession for (and vision of) love so well that it doesn't even need you to like the characters very much in order to admire the depth of feeling they have for each other and enjoy this movie-going experience. So, both couples find their worlds shaken and shaped by love and death, and spend much of their time transcending both. It is well worth watching it happen. This was worth revisiting. An important note on the matter of size
If you get the chance, this is really one for a very big screen. We are lucky that these days most of us have a 40-odd inch screen in their home, but being immersed in this film, to physically look up to it, is where it is at. To feel the music, to become part of the world that is Minghella's creation is worth a cinema ticket. If you can't, although there is plenty to take from watching it scaled down, the epic nature of a film like this will most likely be lost in translation to the small screen. Enjoyable in both settings, but I recommend an outing for this one more than most. |
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AuthorPablo Griffiths is a man with a passion for many things. He has recently taken an interest in writing about film, and himself in the third person. |