'The English Patient', a mosaic of meditative aspects

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): Europeans have been known to leave their cold and structured homelands for the North African desert, ultimately to deal with lost loves, painful love, the fear that new loves would be impossible to find. Casablanca and The Sheltering Sky have both spoken of adulterous passion that blossoms amid the vast emptiness of the Sahara, where one is always surrounded by lost history.

No one believed this more than Canadian author Michael Ondaatje. But, having made it the inspiration behind his Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient, he didn't think the novel could be made into a film. Its mosaic-like and fractured structure almost precluded any hope of translating it onto the silver screen.

However, such liabilities only proved to inspire British playwright Anthony Minghella (Truly, Madly, Deeply) to build his own narrative around what he saw as the crux of the novel. Even then, it still presented everything that the studios didn't want. Lamented its producer, Saul Zaentz, "It was a period piece. It had too many countries and characters. It would run well over two hours." No wonder it took four years of sweating and cajoling until Hollywood finally considered tackling the work.

But what ensued is the undisputed arthouse event of the year with 12 Oscar nominations under its belt. It is a movie which is both epic and intimate, emotional yet suspenseful, and intensely personal yet set against a historical and geographical backdrop so vast it recalls the expanse of Lawrence of Arabia.

Unearthed from the wreckage of a plane, a man is badly burned when his plane is shot down over the Sahara at the start of World War II. Because he speaks Oxford English, he is listed by medics as "the English patient".

In the waning days of the war, we meet him again. Disfigured, immobilized, and amnesiac, he's brought to an isolated Tuscan monastery by Hana (Juliette Binoche), an emotionally-exhausted French-Canadian nurse who instinctively understands the deep emotional damage hidden behind the physical scar.

They are soon joined by the mysterious Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) and a Sikh bomb-disposal expert, Kip (Naveen Andrews). Spurred by their responses, and Hana's reading, the patient's memories start to return in episodic flashbacks, and the present becomes a shared journey as they seek meaning and healing, for each is an enigmatic and troubled soul.

The patient turns out to be Laszlo de Almasy, a Hungarian count who, in 1938 Egypt, mapped the desert for the Royal Geographic Society. He fell in love with Katharine (Kristin Scott-Thomas), the wife of a British aristocrat, Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth), and began a tempestuous affair which was inevitably doomed by the era's seismic shifts in world politics.

As disparate as the flashbacks are, Minghella's poignant artistry manages to weave the central love story into a profoundly moving study of love and loss. And, in the course of caring for Almasy, Hana, too, cures herself. Despite her feelings that she's caused her other relationships to end in death, she dares to love Kip, with whom she shares a brief, albeit tender, romance.

Although Fiennes and Scott Thomas may share an on-screen consummation which cinema was denied of five decades ago, in most other ways, their love story recalls the depths and the scope of the classics. In contrast to Hana's romance with Kip, theirs is a bond which is so adult, so knowing, and so burning in its urgency, transcending both time and place.

The English Patient's hypnotic title sequence suggests that all the meditative aspects of the film -- memory, identity, and the meaninglessness of history and nations -- can all blend into something visual. An unidentifiable dun surface fills the screen. Is it a canvas, a ground, a human skin? Then an artist's brush paints undulating figures on it, and the resulting shapes teasingly refuse to define themselves. The camera shifts to what looks like the contours of a naked female body -- the rippling sand dunes of the Sahara.

Indeed, Minghella's optimal use of the innate powers of the Sahara proves it an inspired atmospheric canvas for the film's many cinematic metaphors, particularly how the changing physical borders of a world at war are linked to the spiritual boundaries over which the central lovers must cross.

The bronzed cinematography by John Seale (Witness, Rain Man), one of the world's most accomplished cinematographers, is definitely Oscar material. The orchestral score, composed by Gabriel Yared (The Lover), and performed by The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields orchestra, is exquisite. The editing by Walter Murch (The Godfather Part III) has also created many scenes of precious beauty, helping dissolve the mutable boundaries of time and nations, and focus on the people who are "the real countries, not the bodies drawn in maps by powerful men".

The movie is also replete with privileged moments of humor and tenderness, and of intimate flushes of humanity -- a glance here, a gesture there, a look that speaks a thousand words. For here is a movie which gives so much care to the segue of image and sound from one scene to the next, even to the actors' intonations and gazes as revelations of human feelings.

Juliette Binoche, one-time winner of a Cesar, France's top acting prize, is the movie's anchor. There is a lovely versatility about her, all suggestive of child-like sensuality and innocence. In Damage and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, she is the ultimate femme fatale who oozes with an under-the- surface passion to be unleashed whenever she pleases. In this movie, she is pure, virginal, earthy -- one whom every man is likely to fall in love with, and every woman would unequivocally trust.

Ralph Fiennes, winner of the London Film Critics Award as 1994's Best British Actor, pays homage to Bogart's character in Casablanca -- silent, reserved, until the right woman releases all of his pent-up passion and he gives her his all. As the dying Almasy, his charisma is undiminished by the layers of heavy prosthetics. Furthermore, he brings an almost hypnotic conviction to the character's internal struggle.

Kristin Scott Thomas, who has quietly built a sterling reputation as the best class act in world cinema, turns the cool, smart, and perceptive Katharine into a deserving object of any man's fixation. Her Katharine is a woman of rare substance and courage -- willful and luminous even in the face of death.

In the end, there is no one to hate or to blame. One only hates the destructiveness of war, the curse of adultery, the impatience of desire, and the bad timing of history. Minghella's risky endeavor has paid off gloriously, proving Saul Zaentz's belief that "tragedy can be renewing and healing".