The Patient English

Nostalgia, either for old-fashioned movie romance or for Michael Ondaatje’s writing, has obscured the real tragedy of The English Patient: that it took an arresting, original story and created from it a film bound by the cinematic cliches of empire.

As with any film adaptation of a novel, particularly one so praised as Mr Ondaatje’s, director Anthony Minghella’s vision for The English Patient has been judged first by the standards of the book. Mr Minghella’s fans say he fashioned a passionate film from a difficult, elliptical book, while Mr Ondaatje’s purist readers fault the director for ignoring Hana and Kip to focus on the more glamorous Katharine and Almasy. Both camps, however, ignore a much more useful comparison. A look at the two other Oscar-winning films of empire, A Passage to India and Out of Africa, reveals The English Patient’s deeper flaws as well as its intriguing possibilities.

The similarities begin with the heroine, a minor character in the book transformed into the movie’s star. This choice is a screenwriter and director’s prerogative, but Mr Minghella took from the novel only what was most easily recognisable the story of a privileged woman whose romantic life is upset by her experience of a strange land. Everything appealing about Katharine Clifton in the movie – her intelligence, her passion, her willingness to buck convention and immerse herself in the ‘real’ Egypt/India/Kenya (in these films, backdrop is secondary to the central romantic drama) – is cribbed from Karen Blixen and Adela Quested.

Each of these women chose for a husband a reliable man of her own circle. Love for them was less important than a comfortable faith in convention. In The English Patient, Katharine marries the solid, patriotic Geoffrey, her childhood friend, after a string of disappointing love affairs. The choice echoes in both Karen Blixen, who marries the agreeable brother of a lover who rejected her, and Adela Quested, who agrees to marry an Indian Civil Service officer despite her fears that he has become a supercilious saheb. More importantly, though, all three use their marriages to leave the confines of wealthy European society and taste a bit of the exotic.

Thus, Katharine Clifton, our plucky heroine, endures a night submerged in a sandstorm to prove she can survive in the desert. A powerful scene, but not much different from Karen Blixen enduring a lion attack to prove she can survive in the veldt, or Adela Quested enduring a trip through the Malabar Caves to prove she can survive the company of Indians. The experience transforms them and forces each of these women to rethink her belief in the benign intentions of colonialism.

However, following the logic of its predecessors, The English Patient seems to suggest that the most dramatic consequence of colonialism was the havoc it played with European marriages. Katharine, her passions awakened by the desert, abandons her marriage at the first opportunity. Had Geoffrey, the poor dupe, watched Out of Africa or A Passage to India, he would have known the hazards of bringing his beautiful wife to such a place. He joins Rohr Blixen and Ronny Heaslop on the list of men who seemed like agreeable enough husbands back in Denmark/England but who didn’t quite measure up in Kenya/India.

The Lurid and Familiar

Into the break steps our dashing hero, Count Lazlo de Almasy. Almasy’s tragedy, like that of Denys Finch-Hatton in Out of Africa and Cyril Fielding in A Passage to India, is that of the well-meaning internationalist. He explores the desert driven by his conviction that nationality doesn’t really matter. An idealist who slips in and out of the bazaar, and the local language, with equal ease, Almasy can abide neither passports nor marriage licences. What does he hate most? “Ownership,” he says to Katharine in the bath. In a similar scene, Denys chides Karen for her illusion that she possesses anything, least of all him, in Africa. “We’re not owners here, Karen. We’re just passing through.”

The hero’s convictions eventually lead him to abandon his class. Almasy’s devotion to Katharine supersedes national loyalty, and he becomes a spy for the Germans to be with her. Fielding’s slightly different passions, for the brotherhood of Englishmen and Indians, lead him to side with the Indian doctor accused of attempting to rape Adela.

The dynamic of the pairs is the same: the idealistic man free of conventional ties who frees the woman from her bourgeois morality. Almasy wants to believe that his rarefied little world is “something finer” than the arrogant nationalism around him, but he, like those before him, is unwittingly drawn into the colonial project. Almasy’s maps, like Finch-Hatton’s game hunting and Fielding’s English teaching, are vital to Britain’s imperial interests. What makes these men any different from the pukka sahebs? They speak the language, they don’t press their khakis, and some of their best friends are natives.

Even the gorgeous scenes in which Almasy and Katharine’s affair unfolds are little more than perfected adaptations. Katharine and Almasy make love nervously at an absurd colonial Christmas party. (Karen and Denys kiss nervously at an absurd colonial New Year’s Eve party.) They read Herodotus in the desert. (Karen and Denys listen to Mozart on safari); Almasy makes a scene at a dinner party. (Fielding makes a scene at the club.) Katharine strolls casually through the bazaar. (Adela rides casually through the bazaar.) The formula for these films is a simple one: show enough of that lurid, teeming world outside to make things interesting, but focus on the familiar – beautiful people in beautiful clothes.

Epic Romance

Ironically, The English Patient’s rehashing of romantic movie conventions fuels much of its appeal. This film is considered a rare contemporary specimen of that nearly extinct species, the epic romance. Katharine and Almasy dance, gaze, swoon, fight, and eventually tear each other’s clothes off without a hint of irony to spoil the fun.

Perhaps the film’s adoring fans cannot be faulted for falling under the spell of a great romance, but its director-screenwriter certainly can be faulted for the choices he made with this particular story. Isak Dinesen and E.M. Forster wrote Out of Africa and A Passage to India from their own experiences as citizens of a colonial empire. The film versions of their stories thus address the excesses and absurdities of colonialism from the perspective of a liberal European. Says the wise English woman, Mrs Moore, in A Passage to India: “India forces one to come face to face with oneself. It can be rather disturbing.”

The English Patient was something entirely different. This book, written in 1992 by a Sri Lanka-born Canadian, is a sort of origins myth of the post-colonial hybrid. The surviving characters are the subjects of the British Empire, and through their experiences of dislocation and ambivalence Mr Ondaatje created a new language in fiction to tell the old stories of Pax Brittanica.

These stories, however, don’t fit neatly into movie conventions. Hana, the Canadian nurse who stays back in the Italian villa-turned-hospital to look after the English patient, and Kip, the Sikh anti-mine expert, fall in love without much complication. Caravaggio plots a revenge against Almasy and then changes his mind. This may be why the film itself seems unable to contain them; they are unpredictable and startling, and, in the end, more interesting. Director Minghella’s challenge was to create a similar new language for these characters in film. Instead, he chose to re-create familiar characters and scenes, using what was most powerful about Mr Ondaatje’s story only as a frame for a classic colonial love story.

The film offers one glimpse of originality, and the squandered potential of the film, in the scene where Kip hoists Hana up a pulley in a darkened, bombed-out church so she can see and touch the faded but still beautiful mural on its walls. The scene recalls one from Out of Africa, in which Denys, as a gesture of affection, takes Karen into a plane for the first time so she can see Africa from the sky. They gaze serenely over their land “through God’s eyes”, as Karen describes it, connected by the romantic ideal that love conquers all, beginning with several million Africans.

Hana and Kip have no such pretensions. They stumble over the rubble of a war that neither can claim as their own and reach out to each other in a moment of pure connection. Theirs is a much more difficult story, and The English Patient in film does not even try to tell it.