Rethinking The English Patient

Years, decades ago now, in 1996 to be exact, I went with my mom and a friend to see The English Patient at an art house theater in the city. I remember being underwhelmed, confused, unable to connect with the story, and realizing that I was missing layers of emotional resonance, as my mom and my girlfriend both rhapsodized over the film. The story of a terminally injured war attaché whose plane was shot down in the North African desert, being cared for by a young combat nurse at a bombed out abbey in Italy at the end of World War Two, the patient’s flashbacks reveal the tale of stolen passion that brought him there. The film went on to win a slew of Academy Awards including Best Picture, and my confusion deepened. It had seemed a bit like a chimera to me, the threads all frayed and dangling, nothing anchored, nothing I could sink into, nothing that slipped down into my psyche, nothing I could trust to stay with me, provoking meaningful insights, beyond the final frame. 

Tonight, on a whim, I watched the movie again and realized how much I was questing for the tangible and sure back then, but this was a war movie, the world it depicted was upside down, nothing could be relied upon, the moment was all anyone had, everything fleeting, insubstantial and changing before it could be fixed in thought or imagination, there was only the inexorable flow of events, slow and languid, then violently surging, unpredictable, exquisite in the small details of survival if one cared to notice them, and how much more fully I understand all this now, life is an insistent teacher, one might even argue that we are once again under the psychological siege of a world at war. 

What life season must I have been in back when I first saw this achingly tender yet wrenching story of secret passion and betrayal? I seem to have had no bandwidth for ambiguity. Also, the young mapmaker protagonist, Count Lazlo Almasy, played by a stunningly beautiful young Ralph Fiennes, is so very evidently and brilliantly autistic, though I’m sure everyone missed that back then.

All these years later, I get why my mother loved the movie so much. She was a nuanced soul. She had lived through a war and knew more of life uncertainties. She also had that unbound Aquarius sensibility while I was locked in my Taurus practicality and was a new wife and mother to boot, with a four and a two year old at home. I was trying to construct the world as something I could tame, its threads not swaying, now gently, now furiously, with the changing wind. Now I know that life’s story is always open ended, always resolving, and then reshaping itself into something new, the ebb and flow of it never truly complete, the margins always outside our view. 

In my late stage surrender, I enjoyed the movie so much more. I’ll probably never learn to meet life with as brave and blithe a spirit as the Juliette Binoche character of the nurse Hana, however. But this time, I was able to take in lines like these last words of the character of Katherine, the mapmaker’s married lover played by Kristin Scott Thomas: 

“We die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we've entered and swum up like rivers. Fears we've hidden in like this wretched cave. I want all this marked on my body. We are the real countries.” 

We are the real countries. 

I completely missed this poetry before. 

Apparently Count Lazlo Almasy is based on a real Hungarian cartographer who was involved in espionage and was stationed in the North African desert during the Second World War. Has anyone here read the far denser Michael Ondaatje novel The English Patient that is the source material for the film? How do the book and film compare, I wonder? I gather the mapmaker is greatly romanticized in the fictionalized retelling of his story. Maybe I’ll read the book next, and try to peer more deeply into what my mother knew.