'The English Patient', a mosaic of meditative aspects

'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".