Saturday, August 27, 2005

The English Patient - 1996

The antidote from 'Fargo' is this movie. Set mostly in the desert, waves of heat almost rise from the DVD case. This was the Best Picture winner of '96 and it's a great one.
The story involves a very badly burned man who is recovered by the Allies in the last part of WWII. Ralph Fiennes plays the 'english' patient and does an outstanding job. He probably deserves a medal just for the makeup he had to endure. The patient has almost no memory of who he is or was.
He falls under the care of a Canadian nurse (the very pretty Juliette Binoche) who believes that she is cursed. "Everyone who loves me, dies", she believes. She takes him out of the medical convoy to spend his last days in an abandoned Italian monastary. She's joined there by Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) a former intelligence man and a Sikh bomb disposer, Kip (Naveen Andrews currently on the show 'Lost').
The movie is told through flashbacks, as bits of memory come back to the patient. Memories of the desert and the time before the war. Also memories of adultry and other betrayals. The story is powerful and very well told. The desert shots are stunning.
The movie portrays adultry in a fairly positive way. I know this bothered some people but not me. Conflict is the essence of drama and it's tough to write moving stories where the characters all act like angels. And the adulterers got their just due and then some.
The FP Gal thought the movie was too long. And the flashbacks bothered her. She thinks they're part of a fad and she's ready for that fad to end. She also didn't think Fiennes was as hot as the women I work with did. She did like the desert shots, though.
First saw this movie in Colorado Springs back in '97. The cheap theater had it and the joint was packed. It's the only time I've ever been to a movie by myself and had people sitting on both sides of me. There is a scene where Andrews takes his very long hair down and the women next to me audibly shuddered. (And the FP Gal doesn't understand why I miss my long hair!)

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