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The English Patient
Under discussion:
The English Patient
(1996)
Whenever I think of
The English Patient
, I remember that I never heard of anyone finishing the award-winning novel by Michael Ondantaaje. When I thought of the movie which I saw a few years ago, all I remembered was a beautiful nurse (Juliette Binoche) leaning over a badly burned patient (Ralph Fiennes) somewhere in
Italy
at the end of World War II. Re-watching revealed a complex, challenging movie. The writer or screen writer has two main challenges. One: he must make us care for the English patient. But the patient is a massively scarred, bed-ridden man with some kind of amnesia. In the increasingly long flashbacks, he is not a particularly lovable man: alone, reticent, handsome, multi-lingual, knotted up inside, with a propensity for staring coldly like a bird of prey. Challenge two: we have to identify with, or feel for, his romance, his great love. But it is with the rather cold wife of one of his acquaintences, lasts a relatively short time, and seems to be based on sex and obsession. But when the English patient finally tells his side of the story, the man who has come to kill him says that he cannot do the deed; the nurse looking after him understands why he wants to die; and we are strangely moved, I think, because the man and his story do not conform to
Hollywood
or cultural stereotypes. This truly was the love of his life, whether it fits our notions or not. And then you start to realize that the movie is replete with other examples of love—short, tall, thin, fat, happy, sad, short, long, etc. They support the author’s theme: The important maps are not political or military but personal and emotional.
posted on Thursday, May 03, 2007 2:46 AM by
JimBell
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