I'll stop short of giving this a perfect ten, but the negative appraisals by some reviewers on this site (sixes, or less!) are not just surprising but frankly alarming. Can some people really be so...such...(sound of huffing and tutting).
The English Patient. It reminded me, a bit, of Godfather Part 2. Quite honestly I felt that it was that much vaunted gangster drama that was overrated. The English Patient also moves between different time periods, but with a good deal more subtlety; they overlap and merge with each other, as memories, as ghosts. It's almost irritating, and it does ask a lot of the spectator, the two hours and forty-two minutes runtime, but it's all worth it, for this movie is desperately, desperately moving.
Ralph Fiennes, already looking a lot like Voldemort. He's burnt to a living cinder when his plane is shot down by the Germans. He has a female passenger, but who is she? The desert people care for him until he is transferred to an Allied convoy. Hannah, a French nurse who believes herself jinxed (everyone she cares for dies) volunteers to nurse him through his final days at a church in Italy, alone. His fate is sealed, so I guess it won't be her fault. But who is her 'English' patient?
We roll back in time to find the patient young and healthy, even hunky. The story of his affair with a married woman. When was the last time you heard the word uxoriousness used? Today it would be simplified into simping, I suppose. Anyway, it doesn't work, evidently, for Colin Firth, the lady's husband, who plays the cuckold. Fiennes is playing a Hungarian count, Alamásy.
Willem Dafoe plays Caravaggio, a mysterious stranger who knows something of the patient's past. He thinks the patient is a criminal of some kind. But he himself is a confessed thief, stealing the morphine from the patient's small stock. Watching the healthy count falling in love with Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), it's like watching Elizabeth Bennett dropping Mr Darcy because she's found someone better looking but even more reserved and uptight. But still, someone capable of writing the statement, 'For the heart is an organ of fire.' By contrast, her hubbie calls her "my sausage", so no wonder she strayed?
The English Patient reminded me, distantly, of other things, other movies, and the use of Bach, and presence of screenwriter/director Anthony MInghella has to remind one of his deeply loved Truly Madly Deeply. This movie, arguably, is his masterpiece (sadly, he was taken too soon). It has the magic of the desert and also the magic of all the movies set in the desert. It is beautifully scored by Gabriel Yared, who also worked on Minghella's Highsmith adaptation, The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). Ralph Fiennes is quite excellent as the patient/count, and Kristin Scott Thomas coolly bewitching as Katherine. Juliette Binoche, so glacial in English language movie Damage (1992) is here all warmth and natural emotion. Willem Dafoe and Colin Firth do superbly in smaller roles, as do Naveen Andrews and TV's Kevin Whateley, both playing bomb disposal guys. An actor who I feel is underused, Jurgen Prochnow (Das Boot; Dune) makes a chilling cameo as a Nazi interrogator.
So, is there any just criticism of this movie? Well, I suppose a little more urgency, especially in the early stages, wouldn't go amiss. Maybe a few more 'plum plums'. Some may find the love story just a little dry, apt though that may be for the desert. I confess I almost wanted to laugh when Hannah lost another one, near the start, but then your heart is in your mouth when she suddenly, in apparent despair, walks right into the minefield. The bomb disposal scene will likewise rob you of oxygen. But what I prefer to think of is instead what I marvelled at, the deftness with which the two points of the story, the burgeoning love and its aftermath, are stitched together, like Katherine's paintings glued into the Count's copy of Herodotos.
One of the great tragic love stories.
The English Patient. It reminded me, a bit, of Godfather Part 2. Quite honestly I felt that it was that much vaunted gangster drama that was overrated. The English Patient also moves between different time periods, but with a good deal more subtlety; they overlap and merge with each other, as memories, as ghosts. It's almost irritating, and it does ask a lot of the spectator, the two hours and forty-two minutes runtime, but it's all worth it, for this movie is desperately, desperately moving.
Ralph Fiennes, already looking a lot like Voldemort. He's burnt to a living cinder when his plane is shot down by the Germans. He has a female passenger, but who is she? The desert people care for him until he is transferred to an Allied convoy. Hannah, a French nurse who believes herself jinxed (everyone she cares for dies) volunteers to nurse him through his final days at a church in Italy, alone. His fate is sealed, so I guess it won't be her fault. But who is her 'English' patient?
We roll back in time to find the patient young and healthy, even hunky. The story of his affair with a married woman. When was the last time you heard the word uxoriousness used? Today it would be simplified into simping, I suppose. Anyway, it doesn't work, evidently, for Colin Firth, the lady's husband, who plays the cuckold. Fiennes is playing a Hungarian count, Alamásy.
Willem Dafoe plays Caravaggio, a mysterious stranger who knows something of the patient's past. He thinks the patient is a criminal of some kind. But he himself is a confessed thief, stealing the morphine from the patient's small stock. Watching the healthy count falling in love with Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), it's like watching Elizabeth Bennett dropping Mr Darcy because she's found someone better looking but even more reserved and uptight. But still, someone capable of writing the statement, 'For the heart is an organ of fire.' By contrast, her hubbie calls her "my sausage", so no wonder she strayed?
The English Patient reminded me, distantly, of other things, other movies, and the use of Bach, and presence of screenwriter/director Anthony MInghella has to remind one of his deeply loved Truly Madly Deeply. This movie, arguably, is his masterpiece (sadly, he was taken too soon). It has the magic of the desert and also the magic of all the movies set in the desert. It is beautifully scored by Gabriel Yared, who also worked on Minghella's Highsmith adaptation, The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). Ralph Fiennes is quite excellent as the patient/count, and Kristin Scott Thomas coolly bewitching as Katherine. Juliette Binoche, so glacial in English language movie Damage (1992) is here all warmth and natural emotion. Willem Dafoe and Colin Firth do superbly in smaller roles, as do Naveen Andrews and TV's Kevin Whateley, both playing bomb disposal guys. An actor who I feel is underused, Jurgen Prochnow (Das Boot; Dune) makes a chilling cameo as a Nazi interrogator.
So, is there any just criticism of this movie? Well, I suppose a little more urgency, especially in the early stages, wouldn't go amiss. Maybe a few more 'plum plums'. Some may find the love story just a little dry, apt though that may be for the desert. I confess I almost wanted to laugh when Hannah lost another one, near the start, but then your heart is in your mouth when she suddenly, in apparent despair, walks right into the minefield. The bomb disposal scene will likewise rob you of oxygen. But what I prefer to think of is instead what I marvelled at, the deftness with which the two points of the story, the burgeoning love and its aftermath, are stitched together, like Katherine's paintings glued into the Count's copy of Herodotos.
One of the great tragic love stories.