The English Patient

The novel  of the same name by Michael Ondaatje is presumably a lot better than this mawkishly heavy-handed adaptation by screenwriter-director Anthony Minghella who took home the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars that year for his work.

Set in the years immediately leading up to and during World War II, it tells the story of a love affair between a Hungarian count, Laszlo Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), and a married woman, Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). The narrative shuttles back and forth between the film's present, which is 1944 Italy when Almasy is being cared for by a Canadian army nurse (Juliette Binoche) as he lays dying of serious burns, and the past, as the bed-ridden victim recalls his liaison with Katharine.

Having the kind of production-heavy conventionality that is regularly rewarded at the Academy Awards as good film-making, The English Patient revels in the manner familiar from what used to be called women’s pictures as it ells the story of a tragic love affair between two souls tortured by their great passion for each other, the death of one, then the ministration to the dying survivor by another sensitive soul bearing her own lovelorn sorrow, the whole thing delivered in an easily digestible servings with plummy English accents and a manipulative score by Gabriel Yared

John Seale's cinematography is very effective in giving the soppy affair its visual style but the self-conscious sensitivity of the whole shebang borders on the insufferable. Binoche, who alternates between a girlish high-spiritedness and melancholy wistfulness is particularly annoying (entirely consistently, she won a Best Supporting Actress for her efforts) but Scott Thomas is nearly as contrived as the object of Almasy’s desire (a sex scene between her and Fiennes about midway is almost laughably forced).

The usually (but not this time) reliable Willem Dafoe turns up to add yet another forced performance to those of the main players and soon to-be heart-throb Colin Firth plays Katharine's cuckolded husband.  Fiennes, who spends half of the film buried under latex makeup, his Almasy needing regular injections of morphine and extracts from Herodotus, is relatively convincing but his character, during the flashback sections at least, is too clearly shaped in the mold of classic debonair Hollywood romantic lovers to have much appeal for a non-female audience.

The film was a huge commercial success in its day and still retains a considerably over-valued popular standing amongst its target audience.

 

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