The English Patient (1996)
Directed by Anthony Minghella
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.
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7 films that influenced The English Patient
What critics say influenced The English Patient
Inevitably recalling Lawrence of Arabia with its desert setting and epic sweep, this skilful adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's difficult novel is at heart two love stories, one in the present, the other told in flashback.
It made me think of Lawrence of Arabia several times, and two reviews I read afterward also mentioned Lawrence of Arabia.
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.
This mix is the film's biggest aesthetic strength, putting it somewhere on the spectrum of great psychological epics on the Lawrence of Arabia model, movies that successfully use an enormous canvas to paint a human-sized portrait (there are few of these that are genuinely good than you might hope for).
From its opening vistas of a propeller plane cruising over rippled sand dunes, which are photographed to suggest the curves of a woman's body (the images are so honey-rich they make Lawrence of Arabia look shabby), The English Patient is an elegant, accomplished piece of high modernist filmmaking.
Casablanca had such a powerful impact on film that its visuals -- the exotic marketplace, the crowded saloons, the final foggy airport sequence -- keep cropping up in contemporary movies, everything from the Indiana Jones films to The English Patient .
Ralph Fiennes gives us an Almasy who seems loosely based on Casablanca 's Rick -- strong and silent until the right woman releases all of his pent-up passion.
THE DESERT ROMANCE HAS A distinguished history in the movies, from Rudolph Valentino's swan song, "Son of the Sheik," in 1926, through the greatest of them all, in which nary a dune appears: 1942's "Casablanca.
Readers of Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning 1993 novel "The English Patient" might not expect the movie version to follow the lead of "Casablanca," "The Bridges of Madison County" or even "Sleepless in Seattle," but you can see why director-screenwriter Anthony Minghella ("Truly, Madly, Deeply") would make such a choice.
That could have been the whole movie -- a kind of inverse Casablanca.
It's "Casablanca" set amid the swirling Sahara sands of North Africa and the voluptuous hills of Tuscany.
Oscar-winning cinematographer John Seales made it look every bit as luscious as “Out of Africa,” another epic romance with flying scenes.
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.
Look for it to win Best Picture in April, then collect dust with movies like Out of Africa and Gandhi.
Readers of Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning 1993 novel "The English Patient" might not expect the movie version to follow the lead of "Casablanca," "The Bridges of Madison County" or even "Sleepless in Seattle," but you can see why director-screenwriter Anthony Minghella ("Truly, Madly, Deeply") would make such a choice.
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With his first work, "Truly, Madly, Deeply," a sort of thinking person�s "Ghost," he delicately traced the anguish of love between two lovers separated by death.
Anthony Minghella ("Truly, Madly, Deeply"/"Mr.
I haven't read Michael Ondaatje's novel, but I suspect it's better than this streamlined (if still long-winded) 1996 adaptation by writer-director Anthony Minghella (Truly Madly Deeply).
Adapted by director Anthony Minghella (who made the wrenchingly romantic "Truly Madly Deeply") from Michael Ondaatje's captivating novel set during the Second World War, the film deftly juggles multiple storylines and unravels several layers of each with the returning memories of a mysterious plane crash victim being nursed through his last days.
Readers of Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning 1993 novel "The English Patient" might not expect the movie version to follow the lead of "Casablanca," "The Bridges of Madison County" or even "Sleepless in Seattle," but you can see why director-screenwriter Anthony Minghella ("Truly, Madly, Deeply") would make such a choice.
Minghella (whose "Truly, Madly, Deeply" and "Mr.
Film editor Walter Murch (instrumental in the editing and sound design of Apocalypse Now) doubtless deserves special praise for his world-class technique -- Minghella acknowledges that the film's mostly seamless feat of flitting over and over again from setting to setting was largely conceived and achieved in the cutting room.
(If you do, please explain it to me!) It also can't be said that Cemetery Man exactly breaks new ground in cinematic technique, though jokes aside, the creepy score by Manuel De Sica and Riccardo Besio was hands down the best I heard in 1996, The English Patient and The Portrait of a Lady be damned.