Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. The English Patient is the sixty-ninth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. It’s 1944 and the war in Europe is winding down. A French-Canadian nurse named Hana (Juliette Binoche) is caring for a mysterious burn patient with an English accent who claims to have no recollection of his name or past. Devastated by the deaths of her boyfriend and close friends, Hana sets up camp with the titular English Patient at a deserted monastery in the Italian hills. While convalescing in the bombed out church, the dying man’s past is revealed through flashbacks. Those flashbacks run through the 1930s, right up to the outset of World War II. Before suffering full body burns, the English Patient was known as Count Laszlo Almásy (Ralph Fiennes,) a Hungarian cartographer with the Royal Geographical Society. He and his compatriots don’t think much of the way the world is carved up into countries and borders, forming their own international unit of historians and explorers. It is not just the land Almásy is interested in charting, as he falls deeply for Katherine (Kristin Scott Thomas,) the wife of another member of the exploring party. Soon he and Katherine embark on a multi-year love affair that has the potential to unravel them both. The English Patient is a rather unique film, both in structure and characterization. Almásy’s flashbacks are so frequent that the two timelines are practically told in parallel. It’s a gimmick that probably holds the film back more than it is additive as the two stories unfolding do not overlap thematically enough to justify the choice. Binoche’s nurse develops a romance with a Sikh soldier, Kip (Naveen Andrews,) that has a great tension. He diffuses bombs for the British Indian Army but struggles to disarm himself enough to let Hana in. It’s a tender romance that is frequently cut away from to revisit Almásy and Katherine’s illicit affair. As the central dynamic of the film, that affair simply does not hold together well enough to ground the rest of the story revolving around it. That is not even to say that the relationship is not believable or that Fiennes and Scott Thomas don’t have chemistry to some degree. Rather they are each playing characters that are far less accessible thats Binoche and Andrews. Fiennes’ Hungarian count is cold and bitter, lashing out at everyone, most of all Katherine. Scott Thomas, by contrast plays her part as charming but aloof, with little role in the story beyond an object of affection. Of the two romances anchoring the film the one that held more depth in my eyes was the one given far less of the story’s attention. Neither feels overly connected to the other, beyond the faint idea of romance under the harshest of conditions. Fiennes is far more interesting as the fading burn patient than he is as a pompous explorer traversing the desert. Despite an epic sweep to the film, the emotional pull simply was not enough to hold The English Patient together. 6/10
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