The English Patient
1996 · Directed by Anthony Minghella
Original language: English
- drama
- romance
- war
The story
In the 1930s, Count Almásy is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics.
What it’s like
Sun-bleached and amber-toned, with the desert rendered in blown-out gold and the wartime interiors lit in dusky candle-brown, this is a film that lives in heat and memory. Its camera drifts through the Italian monastery and the dunes in long, fluid movements, lingering on dust hanging in shafts of light, on bruised skies, on faces half-lost in shadow. The score is lush and string-heavy, with aching melodic swells that often give way to near-silence, so the wind and the crackle of a gramophone become part of the texture. Sensual and melancholy in a slow, sustained way, it moves through layered flashbacks at a deliberate, unhurried pace, and its emotional register is elegiac, romantic and quietly grieving. It follows a badly burned, nearly nameless man in his final weeks, piecing together a love affair in the desert and the cost of a wartime betrayal. Violence is present but sparse: wartime bombing, a brief and sudden shooting, and a plane crash, with burn injuries shown in some detail. Sexual content is frank but not explicit. It suits a rainy evening, a slow solo night in, or anyone who wants a romance with weight and ache, for viewers who enjoy sweeping period cinema and tragic, achingly beautiful love stories.
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