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Backward into memory, forward into loss and desire, “The English Patient” searches for answers that will answer nothing. This poetic, evocative film version of the famous novel by Michael Ondaatje circles down through layers of mystery until all of the puzzles in the story have been solved, and only the great wound of a doomed love remains. It is the kind of movie you can see twice--first for the questions, the second time for the answers.

The film opens with a pre-war biplane flying above the desert, carrying two passengers in its open cockpits. The film will tell us who these passengers are, why they are in the plane, and what happens next. All of the rest of the story is prologue and epilogue to the reasons for this flight. It is told with the sweep and visual richness of a film by David Lean , with an attention to fragments of memory that evoke feelings even before we understand what they mean.

The “present” action takes place in Italy, during the last days of World War II. A horribly burned man, the “English patient” of the title, is part of a hospital convoy. When he grows too ill to be moved, a nurse named Hana ( Juliette Binoche ) offers to stay behind to care for him in the ruins of an old monastery. Here she sets up a makeshift hospital, and soon she is joined by two bomb-disposal experts and a mysterious visitor named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe).

The patient's skin is so badly burned it looks like tortured leather. His face is a mask. He can remember nothing. Hana cares for him tenderly, perhaps because he reminds her of other men she has loved and lost during the war. (“I must be a curse. Anybody who loves me--who gets close to me--is killed.”) Caravaggio, who has an interest in the morphine Hana dispenses to her patient, is more cynical: “Ask your saint who he's killed. I don't think he's forgotten anything.” The nurse is attracted to one of the bomb disposal men, a handsome, cheerful Sikh officer named Kip ( Naveen Andrews ). But as she watches him risk his life to disarm land mines, she fears her curse will doom him; if they fall in love, he will die. Meanwhile, the patient's memories start to return in flashes of detail, spurred by the book that was found with his charred body--an old leather-bound volume of the histories of Herodotus, with drawings, notes and poems pasted or folded inside.

I will not disclose the crucial details of what he remembers. I will simply supply the outlines that become clear early on. He is not English, for one thing. He is a Hungarian count, named Laszlo de Almasy ( Ralph Fiennes ), who in Egypt before the war was attached to the Royal Geographic Society as a pilot who flew over the desert, making maps that could be used for their research--which was the cover story--but also used by English troops in case of war.

In the frantic social life of Cairo, where everyone is aware that war is coming, Almasy meets a newly married woman at a dance. She is Katharine Clifton ( Kristin Scott Thomas ). Her husband Geoffrey ( Colin Firth ) is a disappointment to her. Almasy follows her home one night, and she confronts him and says, “Why follow me? Escort me, by all means, but to follow me . . .” It is clear to both of them that they are in love. Eventually they find themselves in the desert, part of an expedition, and when Geoffrey is called away (for reasons which later are revealed as good ones), they draw closer together. In a stunning sequence, their camp is all but buried in a sandstorm, and their relief at surviving leads to a great romantic sequence.

These are the two people--the count and the British woman--who were in the plane in the first shot. But under what conditions that flight was taken remains a mystery until the closing scenes of the movie, as do a lot of other things, including actions by the count that Caravaggio, the strange visitor, may suspect. Actions that may have led to Caravaggio having his thumbs cut off by the Nazis.

All of this back-story (there is much more) is pieced together gradually by the dying man in the bed, while the nurse tends to him, sometimes kisses him, bathes his rotting skin, and tries to heal her own wounds from the long war. There are moments of great effect: One in which she plays hopscotch by herself. A scene involving the nurse, the Sikh, and a piano. Talks at dusk with the patient, and with Caravaggio. All at last becomes clear.

The performances are of great clarity, which is a help to us in finding our way through the story. Binoche is a woman whose heart has been so pounded by war that she seems drawn to its wounded, as a distraction from her own hurts. Fiennes, in what is essentially a dual role, plays a man who conceals as much as he can--at first because that is his nature, later because his injuries force him to. Thomas is one of those bright, energetic British women who seem perfectly groomed even in a sandstorm, and whose core is steel and courage.

Dafoe's character must remain murkier, along with his motives, but it is clear he shelters a great anger. And Andrews, as the bomb-disposal man, lives the closest to daily death and seems the most grateful for life.

Ondaatje's novel has become one of the most widely read and loved of recent years. Some of its readers may be disappointed that more is not made of the Andrews character; the love between the Sikh and the nurse could provide a balance to the doomed loves elsewhere. But the novel is so labyrinthine that it's a miracle it was filmed at all, and the writer-director, Anthony Minghella , has done a creative job of finding visual ways to show how the rich language slowly unveils layers of the past.

Producers are not always creative contributors to films, but the producer of “The English Patient,” Saul Zaentz , is in a class by himself. Working independently, he buys important literary properties (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” “ Amadeus ,” “ The Unbearable Lightness of Being ,” “At Play in the Fields of the Lord”) and savors their difficulties. Here he has created with Minghella a film that does what a great novel can do: Hold your attention the first time through with its story, and then force you to think back through everything you thought you'd learned, after it is revealed what the story is *really* about.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

The English Patient (1996)

Rated R For Sexuality, Some Violence and Language

160 minutes

Colin Firth as Geoffrey Clifton

Ralph Fiennes as Almasy

Kristin Scott Thomas as Katharine Clifton

Juliette Binoche as Hana

Willem Dafoe as Caravaggio

Naveen Andrews as Kip

Written and Directed by

Anthony Minghella

Based On The Novel by

Michael Ondaatje

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The English Patient Reviews

... a 'Casablanca' for the 90s, directed with sweep, elegance, and grand passions by Anthony Minghella from his screenplay adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel.

Full Review | Nov 18, 2023

...from sweeping vistas, incredible performances, and one incredible score, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient is one of the most beautiful films...

Full Review | Jun 14, 2023

Phantom of the Desert

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 5, 2022

The rich complexity of Minghella's approach finds an incomparable balance between classical storytelling and a modern formal treatment, and therein realizes one of the most enduring, beloved, and unique romances ever to come out of Hollywood.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 21, 2022

Much like the patient's memories, The English Patient swirls around in your head, refusing to recede, its images lingering like snatches of a fragrance too sweet to be forgotten.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 17, 2021

Epically romantic stuff, with a welcome dose of modernism mixed up in an intriguing mystery.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Sep 11, 2020

If Minghella's debut feature Truly, Madly, Deeply was overrated -- a Ghost for the NW3 set -- this movie is a quantum leap towards cinema's potential for magic.

Full Review | Feb 4, 2020

You can take your brain to The English Patient and you will not be insulted. Your eyes will not be offended either. This scarcely makes Minghella's film the best in the world; it just makes it loom large.

Whenever the movie's design seems too elaborate, too remote, it's the rare detail of these performances that redeems it.

Full Review | Feb 21, 2019

Minghella doesn't so much adapt the novel as he translates it wondrously to a different medium, with its mysteries and passions intact.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 21, 2019

...a deliberate, lengthy but always fascinating film...

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 21, 2019

Its performances are finely crafted with loving care.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2019

This is a radical adaptation which transposes, re-assembles and deletes key elements of the novel to achieve a pure cinematic reinvent ion that is admirably adroit - and as distinctive a work of art as the book remains in its own right.

Full Review | Feb 19, 2019

Its wit, sophistication and artistry never are at odds with the fundamental pull of a powerful love story that out-Zhivagos Doctor Zhivago because it respects love's mysteries, admits it doesn't know the heart's boundaries.

Full Review | Apr 27, 2018

...a beautiful film. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Mar 2, 2018

Relentlessly beautiful, but not quite stupifyingly so

Full Review | Mar 1, 2018

Probably untranslatable to the screen. The English Patient is a noble try. But still a bore.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 1, 2018

It is, after all, quite a lot of movie, two hours and 42 minutes' worth, and the more movie you have, the greater the chances that not all of it will work equally well.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 4, 2015

It took a filmmaker with Anthony Minghella's vision to even attempt an adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. And it took a filmmaker with Minghella's talent to pull it off.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 22, 2015

Anthony Minghella believes in ghosts -- and, at his best, makes believers out of viewers, too.

Full Review | Feb 22, 2015

November 15, 1996 The English Patient By JANET MASLIN hristmas in Cairo, 1938: an exquisite sequence in "The English Patient," one of so many in this fiercely romantic, mesmerizing tour de force. In the courtyard of the British Embassy, soldiers sit at tables baking in the sun while a bagpipe plays "Silent Night." The heat is overwhelming. And the effect is one of dizzying incongruity, as if all the conventions of ordinary life had been suspended. The world has palpably been turned upside down. Even more torrid than the weather is the erotic pull that draws Katharine Clifton, an elegant Englishwoman who is helping to preside over this party, to the ornate window behind which her handsome, obsessed lover hides. He longs to lure her away for one of the trysts that fill this haunting film with its intricate array of memories. "Swoon," he whispers ardently. "I'll catch you." She does swoon. No wonder. "The English Patient," a stunning feat of literary adaptation as well as a purely cinematic triumph, begins long after this love affair has come to a terrible end. The man of the title, who once pursued Katharine with such intensity, has been literally consumed by fire. Scarred beyond recognition, he lies in a bombed-out Tuscan monastery in the waning days of World War II and is tended by Hana, a luminous nurse. Hana performs near-miracles. So does Anthony Minghella's film as it weaves extravagant beauty around a central character whose condition is so grotesque. The same was true for Michael Ondaatje's poetic and oblique 1992 novel, a winner of the Booker Prize. From the standpoint of film adaptation the book is hugely daunting, and not merely because its hero is disfigured and confined to his bed. "There are stories the man recites quietly into the room which slip from level to level like a hawk," Ondaatje wrote of the injured man sifting through his memories. This dreamlike, nonlinear tale moves in much the same way, swooping gracefully from past to present, from one set of lovers to another, from the contours of the body to the topography of the desert sands. In love with the mystery of far-flung places, the book invokes geography, wartime espionage and consuming physical passion as it evocatively spans the globe. Minghella (whose "Truly, Madly, Deeply" and "Mr. Wonderful" are no preparation for this) manages to be astonishingly faithful to the spirit of this exotic material while giving it more shape and explicitness, virtually reinventing it from the ground up. He has described what he aspires to here as "epic cinema of a personal nature." With its immense seductiveness, heady romance and glorious desert vistas at the "Lawrence of Arabia" level, "The English Patient" imaginatively lives up to that description. Like T.E. Lawrence, the English patient -- actually the Hungarian Count Laszlo Almasy -- comes to the desert as a cartographer and stays to find himself caught up in war. And Ralph Fiennes, as Almasy, makes himself the most dashing British actor to brood in such settings since the young Peter O'Toole. Though Fiennes plays the film's Tuscan scenes from beneath pale, bristly stubble and a mask of weblike scars (courtesy of Jim Henson's Creature Shop), he is often seen as a dazzling, elusive figure working with the Royal Geographical Society in remote corners of North Africa. The film's debonair side is so highly developed that the actors playing these adventurers wear dinner clothes from a tailor who dressed the Duke of Windsor. As the burn victim confides in Hana (played with radiant simplicity by Juliette Binoche, as a woman recovering her own equilibrium), the details of this earlier life unfold. And the film, like Almasy himself, is most alive in the tempestuous past. "The English Patient" sets off sparks with the grand entrance of Katharine, played by Kristin Scott Thomas in a great career-altering change of pace. Ms. Scott Thomas' more restrained roles anticipate nothing of her sensual allure and glittering sophistication here. Katharine descends grandly from the skies with an airplane and a husband (Colin Firth) at her disposal. "She was always crying on my shoulder for somebody," Geoffrey Clinton confides, without realizing that his wife and Almasy have become feverishly involved. "Finally persuaded her to settle for my shoulder. Stroke of genius." Meanwhile, Almasy's obsession does not escape the notice of Madox (Julian Wadham), his worldly friend and colleague. "Madox knows, I think," he tells Katharine. "He keeps talking about Anna Karenina. It's his idea of a man-to-man chat." There is no time, while being swept away by the sheer magnetism of "The English Patient," to complain that this kind of treachery is not earthshaking or new. The film has so many facets, and combines them in such fascinating and fluid style (with great polish from John Seale's cinematography, Stuart Craig's production design, Gabriel Yared's insinuating score and Walter Murch's adroit editing), that its cumulative effect is much stronger than the sum of its parts. So in exchange for a sharp central story -- or even one that is easily described -- the film offers such indelible images as cave paintings of swimmers in the desert, a sandstorm of mysterious (and prophetic) fury as Almasy and Katharine are thrown together, and the English patient's great treasure, a well-worn, memento-filled volume of Herodotus. Even without that book, the film's reverence for history and literature would be very clear. The film's parallels and layers also incorporate Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a wily Canadian thief whose fate is linked to Almasy's and whose name, like every other detail here, has been chosen with intriguing care. A more captivating character who receives shorter shrift is Kip (Naveen Andrews), the voluptuously handsome Sikh who defuses land mines and becomes gently involved with Hana. The spareness with which Ondaatje describes this liaison has a piercing loveliness that Minghella's film mirrors: "She walks towards his night tent without a false step or any hesitation. The trees make a sieve of moonlight, as if she is caught within the light of a dance hall's globe. She enters his tent and puts an ear to his sleeping chest and listens to his beating heart, the way he will listen to a clock on a mine. Two a.m. Everyone is asleep but her." "The English Patient" sees the eloquent delicacy in that passage and brings it to every frame. "The English Patient" is rated R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult gurdian). It includes violence, nudity, sexual situations, and one terrifying scene involving torture. NOTES The English Patient. Directed by Anthony Minghella; written by Minghella, based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje; director of photography, John Seale; edited by Walter Murch; music by Gabriel Yared; production designer, Stuart Craig; produced by Saul Zaentz; released by Miramax Films. Running time: 160 minutes. This film is rated R. With: Ralph Fiennes (Almasy), Juliette Binoche (Hana), Willem Dafoe (Caravaggio), Kristin Scott Thomas (Katharine Clifton), Naveen Andrews (Kip), Colin Firth (Geoffrey Clifton) and Julian Wadham (Madox). Showtimes and tickets from 777-FILM Online

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The English Patient

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Get ready for the great romance of the movie year. It’s clear from the shimmering, startling opening shot: Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), a Hungarian count, desert explorer and pilot, is flying Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), the married Englishwoman he loves, over the Sahara in a small plane during World War II. German fire sends them parachuting to the desert in flames, his body clinging to hers in a paradigm of love and death. Admirers of the 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje won’t remember things beginning that way because they didn’t. Writer and director Anthony Minghella ( Truly, Madly, Deeply ) has altered the novel. I said altered, not mutilated. Ondaatje, a Canadian citizen born in Sri Lanka, told his story in lyrical bursts. Minghella, born in England to Italian parents, imposes a more linear structure, maximizes Almasy and Katharine at the expense of other characters, and sacrifices some of the book’s mystery for cinematic coherence. Yet Ondaatje’s poetic spirit flares brightly onscreen.

Granted, The English Patient runs nearly three hours and sounds like the self-important froufrou ( Out of Africa ) that wins Oscars and bores most of us brainless. But the gifted Minghella has distilled the novel with rare grace and incendiary feeling. Almasy, burned beyond recognition and ripped from the dead Katharine by Bedouins, is cared for at an army hospital where he is known only as “the English patient.” When the Allies move on, Hana (Juliette Binoche), a Canadian nurse, cares for her patient alone at an abandoned Italian monastery, where she comforts him with reading and morphine. The two aren’t alone for long. Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh officer in the British Army, arrives to defuse bombs and stays to quicken a passion in Hana that she had long thought dead. Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe in full, flinty vigor), a crafty thief who had his thumbs cut off by the Nazis, comes to find out whether the English patient is really the German spy who betrayed him.

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This hypnotic epic, impeccably produced by Saul Zaentz ( Amadous ) and stunningly shot by John Seale ( Witness ), moves across time and the borders of Italy, Egypt and North Africa to link its two love stories. Binoche and Andrews are vibrant and moving, though the back story of Hana and Kip’s interracial affair has been truncated for the screen. It’s the memories of the English patient, filtered through pain and drug-induced delirium, that provide the focus for Minghella, whose artful script and direction mark him as a master of intimate emotion.

Fiennes, in or out of disfiguring makeup, gives a performance of probing intelligence and passionate heart. And Scott Thomas, mistaken as chilly by those who know her only from Four Weddings and a Funeral , is an incandescent revelation in her first full-out romantic role. Katharine betrays her husband (a superb, touching Colin Firth) in scenes of sizzling eroticism with Almasy that lead to scalding guilt. On first seeing Katharine, Almasy is told by a friend: “She’s charming, and she’s read everything,” Intellect and carnality fuse combustibly in the rhapsodically sexy Scott Thomas. Flashbacks reveal how the cool, cynical Almasy becomes drunk on Katharine, forging his honor through a commitment that prevails over the conflicting loyalties of war. With The English Patient, Minghella proves that a movie love story can be smart, principled and provoking, and still sweep you away.

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The English Patient Review

01 Jan 1996

160 minutes

English Patient, The

The ingredients most likely to give a critic indigestion are fatty emotions and over-ripened sentimentality. And so it was that The English Patient succeeded so magnificently, both critically and to the tune of £12 million at the UK box office. And yet, in its ambition to underplay every emotional nuance (except for Ralph Fiennes' visceral outburst late in the film), it ultimately under-performs.

While the film offers understatement, the critics have preferred to overstate its merits. The story recounts the journey of the mysterious Count Almasy (Fiennes), a cartographer of uncertain nationality who is dragged, badly burned and half-dead, from the wreckage of his bi-plane at the tail end of World War II. As he is placed under the care of Canadian army nurse Hana (Oscar-winner Binoche) to live out the final days of the war in a dilapidated Italian villa, a magnificent story unravels (in flashback) of his illicit love for a married woman, Katharine Clifton (Scott-Thomas).

Simultaneously, Hana is completing her own emotional journey with the help of a bomb disposal officer (Naveen Andrews with whom she shares one of the truly classic scenes in the film), and occupational thief Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) appears out of nowhere to question the elusive Almasy, suspecting him of being the spy who helped the Germans to get their men into the Sahara.

There is a compelling lack of emotional involvement here: the brief flashes of unbridled feeling certainly hit home, and when they come, they excise quickly any doubt about the effectiveness of Fiennes, but still we care little for this underwhelming Count Almasy and his flighty, faintly irritating, inamorata Katharine Clifton. Some might argue that this is deliberate and is true to an "unfilmable" novel (Booker Prize-winner by Michael Ondaatje) but on the small screen, the majestic vistas of vanilla deserts and blistering sunsets are mere Discovery Channel fodder and do not make up for the low-fat epic romance.

Here is passion that merely blisters the heart rather than blasts it asunder. After a heart-stopping, nine Academy Award-winning, six Bafta scooping and two Golden Globe-grabbing journey to classic status, there is an unthinking consensus about The English Patient which belies its true quality.

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The english patient.

Written and directed by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje, this long and searching movie, from 1996, brings together many stories. First, there is an adulterous love affair between Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) and Katherine (Kristin Scott Thomas), which unfolds in North Africa before the outbreak of the Second World War. Then, as the war winds down, the badly burned Almásy is cared for in an abandoned Italian monastery by a French-Canadian nurse (Juliette Binoche), who has an affair with a Sikh soldier (Naveen Andrews). Then the mysterious Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a scavenging thief who appears to know the secrets of Almásy’s past, shows up. All these plotlines interweave and tauten right up to the unbearable romantic tension of the climax. The triumph of the film lies not just in the force and the range of the performances—the crisp sweetness of Scott Thomas, say, versus the raw volatility of Binoche—but in Minghella’s creation of an intimate epic: vast landscapes mingle with the minute details of desire, and the combination is transfixing.

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Saturday 19 December 2015

Movie review: the english patient (1996).

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The Definitives

Critical essays, histories, and appreciations of great films

The English Patient

Essay by brian eggert february 13, 2009.

Built layer by breathless layer, The English Patient has no need to construct its story according to chronology. From the labyrinthine novel by Michael Ondaatje, writer-director Anthony Minghella adapted a text from which he could develop his own desire for emotion-guided storytelling, versus concern for staid sequential order. Minghella’s objective allows for a narrative progression that feels natural according to basic intuitions; the timeline therein does not move forward but rather in abstract directions, yet always with an emotionally guided destination. Pieces of the past come together to inform the present, memory fragments arranged out of order seem rightly placed, and pathos channels scenes and characters within the film’s composition. While preserving the structure of Ondaatje’s celebrated book, Minghella’s arrangement of time proceeds cinematically. His method contains temporal and geographical transitions that shift in poetic, emotional, though perhaps not logical ways. But they work on film, and augment the magic of the cinema. The story tells the audience what they need to know when they need to know it. Much like jazz music or expressionist art, the film moves forward through perceptive changes in time and space that make sense only when appreciated as a whole.

And yet, Minghella’s film exhibits traits of neither the avant-garde nor spontaneous filmmaking. Indeed, his filmic atmosphere exudes traditionalism and epic romanticism, in that The English Patient might be described as a postmodern Lawrence of Arabia . Certainly, Minghella’s picturesque approach in this and his subsequent films compare to the great David Lean’s output. Minghella’s tone is delicate, absorbing, and trails along a passageway that never breaks or separates by unorthodox editing, flowing through flawless transitions. Bodies become shadows. Locations fade into somewhere else. Focus zeroes-in on a single object and pulls back to reveal the object has been transported entirely. Even as the story migrates between various countries in assorted times, the changeovers feel effortless and perhaps more organic than would a standard moment-by-moment succession.

What brings Almásy to the point of his scarred and devastated self is rendered with the best of cinematic tragedy, severe romance, and the finest performances by a cast of capable actors. Fiennes must, in essence, play two roles to accomplish the film’s potency. His unbending Almásy is kneaded by Katharine into a softened inamorato, and in his fragile burned condition he is little more than a shell clinging to his disjointed recollections. Binoche embodies Hana’s frailty as if beaten by time and loss, yet resilient enough to perform the euthanasia that grants her closure. Scott Thomas lends Katharine both ruggedness and refinement. Andrews never allows his genial intensity to fade. And Dafoe makes desperation look effortless.

Inherently every person and political entity—and everything in-between—simultaneously seeks freedom within organization, impossible though it may be; the characters in the film reach outside superficial limitations to find love and hope for freedom, however they see the tightening grasp of nationalism during wartime squeezing in. While governments and their soldiers see only accents and uniforms, the story offers a cavalcade of individuals transcending such restrictions. Whether a Sikh bomb disposal expert, Canadian reporter, French-Canadian nurse, Hungarian intellectual, or British cartographer, the lovers depicted within the narrative have no regard for nonexistent border cutting off people from people. Minghella’s film makes one of cinema’s great motions toward idealistic universality, much like Jean Renoir’s masterpiece Grand Illusion from 1937.

Few believed in the project. Minghella doubted himself, being an unproven filmmaker in charge of such a noted production. And yet, The English Patient would go on to almost universal acclaim, winning nine Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Juliette Binoche. While Zaentz amassed the particulars necessary to mobilize the film, Minghella composed its distinctive pitch and orchestrated the filmic harmonies that would best translate the source material. His directing and writing styles align with Michael Ondaatje’s approach as a poetic novelist. Ondaatje puts poetry into fiction and Minghella communicates that miraculously to film, always with profound attention to the emotional reality of his characters. With The English Patient , he endeavored to prove himself with a challenging foundation, and he did, and would continue to do so throughout his short career. Minghella died in 2008, leaving behind a handful of pictures each uniquely his: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), and Breaking and Entering (2006) each display the filmmaker’s motivation to tell stories in affecting, instinctual, intellectual, yet emotional terms, while never sacrificing the broad reach of his audience.

Bibliography:

Bricknell, Timothy (edited by). Minghella on Minghella . London: Faber & Faber, 2005.

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The English Patient Movie Review: When Were You Most Happy?

Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient is an epic war drama with two romances thrown in for spice. All three parts: the war drama, the romance in the past, and the romance in the present, will keep you on the edge of your seat. Ralph Fiennes plays the English Patient (a highly fictionalized László Almásy – a famous Hungarian cartographer).

László has been shot down in his plane and received life-threatening burns all over his body. Hana (Juliette Binoche) is his French-Canadian nurse who has decided to leave her convoy and tend to her dying patient in a peaceful, though ransacked, building along the way.

Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) was László’s lover during World War II. She was married to Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth) at the time, who assists various governments with aerial photographs of the landscape. So begins more than 40 amazing transitions between the present and the past. In the present, while Hana takes care of the English Patient, she is falling in love with Lieutenant Kip, a Sihk in the British Indian Army who is in the area defusing bombs.

Last, László must contend with a visitor, Caravaggio (Willem DaFoe), who was tortured during the war, including having his thumbs cut off. He has already killed two of the people involved in his torture, but now he is looking for the last person responsible – whomever gave the Germans maps of Cairo, and Caravaggio believes László may be the man he is after.

The direction and editing are absolutely seamless when they come to wending their way through several plots that all lead to the same spot in the present. There is no surprise this film won Best Picture. You deserve to have a copy of The English Patient on your shelf, and you deserve to watch it while hopelessly in love.

Greg Hammond

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