NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
The English Patient She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill toward the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly enters the house. In the kitchen she doesnt pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.
She turns into the room which is another garden this one made up of trees and bowers painted over its walls and ceiling. The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze, and he turns his head slowly towards her as she enters. Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet. She wets a washcloth and holding it above his ankles squeezes the water onto him, looking up as he murmurs, seeing his smile.
Above the shins the burns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone. She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks.
He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no pillow, looking up at the foliage painted onto the ceiling, its canopy of branches, and above that, blue sky. She pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she can touch him. She loves the hollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin. Reaching his shoulders she blows cool air onto his neck, and he mutters. What?
she asks, coming out of her concentration. He turns his dark face with its gray eyes towards her. She puts her hand into her pocket. She unkind the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth. He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died. Back to Top Reviews A rare and spellbinding web of dreams.
Time magazine A magically told novelravishingmany-layered. Los Angeles Times Profound, beautiful and heart-quickening. Toni Morrison Lyrical. An exquisite ballet that takes place in the dark. Boston Sunday Globe A tale of many pleasures an intensely theatrical tour de force but grounded in Michael Ondaatje's strong feeling for distant times and places. The New York Times Book Review A poetry of smoke and mirrors.
Washington Post Book World It is an adventure, mystery, romance, and philosophical novel in one. Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet. Chicago Tribune Author Tour Catch Michael Ondaatje reading from and signing The English Patient in the following cities: November 5: Amherst College, Amherst, MA. November 18: Wordsworth Books, Brattle Theater, Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA.
November 21: Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC. 5: 30 pm November 23: Miami Book Fair International, Miami, FL. December 18: Borders, 1360 Westwood Blvd. , Los Angeles, CA 7: 30 pm December 19: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books, 601 Van Ness Ave, Opera Plaza, San Francisco, CA 7: 30 pm. December 20: Book Passage, 51 Total Vista, Corte Madera, CA 7: 30 pm January 9: Seattle Arts &# 038; Lecture, 5 th Avenue Theater, Seattle, WA 7: 30 pm write about film, in the dark if I must, with notepad and pen, my notes all tumbling down to the right. When I cant decipher those lines, and when I fear that in looking down Ive missed something rare and fleeting on the screen, I give up the notes. Instead, I see the film, hanging on for dear life, and write down my recollections later, like someone whos just interviewed King Kong. This job cant be done.
When Birth of a Nation opened in 1915, Woodrow Wilson is alleged to have said it was like history written with lightning. Anyone who writes about film is trying to bottle lightning, for sooner or later we know the handicap of words and sentences in conveying a pause, a look, a light, or something ineffably cinematic up on the screen. Yes, there are scripts before that wonder, scripts that arrange words. But scripts are not films; they are another story, somewhere between promotional brochure and hollow insurance policy. If it was all in the script, the director Nicholas Ray asked once, why make the movie? Why indeed?
And why bother to write about a sensation that has come and gone? Arent the movies about being there in the dark? This column will ponder these questions and the impossibility of getting a grip on lightning. It will not be a review column in the regular sense.
So Im not bothering to suggest that you see The English Patient, the new movie made from the novel by Michael Ondaatje. Rather, Im taking it for granted that early on in the movie you knew you were going to see it again. Because something wonderful and mysterious has happened. Film and the Novel remains a perennial course of academic nice, polite flower and yet a funeral bloom for excitement. Kids are seeing Sense and Sensibility and Emma, reading the books, and finding to their dismay that Jane Austen was not a sitcom writer but an ironic intelligence. Movie makers raid the library for proven successes and stories they cant invent.
And because the films so often travesty the good books, so the wisdom has spread that bad literature makes the best movies. (In the dark, Michael Crichton is better than William Faulkner. ) As a rule, seeing the movie to know a book better is as stupid as reading the rip-off novelization of a hit picture. Films and books are as separate as men and women. But which is which? In spite of film seeming so operatic and spectacular a medium, its actually more modest than a book in its use of language. Because a book has to do so much to raise you to an emotional level that you simply see on film. Its all there.
I dont think I could ever write a screenplay. Theres a subtlety in writing for film that I just dent have. The right face needs to say so little. The speaker is Michael Ondaatje, the novelist (born in Sri Lanka, educated in England, and now a resident of Canada), who saw the final version of The English Patient only in late October, at a New York junket introducing the picture to the press.
He was tense as hell about it, and a similar apprehension may affect those who loved the book. I have even heard some admirers insist they wouldnt see the film. Ondaatje went to the New York screening as a fellow soldier with producer Saul Zaentz and writer-director Anthony Minghella. He had no credited role on the film beyond writing the book.
But he had attended prolonged script conferences, offered an authors ideas (an author can have second thoughts) and become the first person Zaentz and Minghella wanted to please. Prior to New York, though, the last cut Ondaatje had seen was three hours twenty minutes forty minutes longer than the two-hour-forty-minute release version. So he had reason to be tense. Hed loved the long cut, even if it had abandoned all the English scenes from the novel. More still must have been lost in bringing the film down further. When Minghella first read the book, he was intoxicated, so stirred by the story he wanted to see it.
Yet as he sobered up, he could not fathom how to film it. Thats worth stressing, for the seemingly endless campaign of doing a movie needs some passionate, and even incoherent, drive. Gone with the Wind worked, I suspect, because Vivien Leigh was obsessed with the book; no one else on the movie shared her love, or need, for the story. As Minghella applied himself to research and writing, he saw two opportunities in The English Patient, or two ways it might become his: Ive always been very interested in details of behavior the way people are together. And here was a story where I could pursue that on a large historical canvas, moving from the tiny to the huge, cut by cut. I also saw a chance for a kind of catalog of loves love of country, a nurses love for a patient, innocent romantic love, love of the desert and learning, and the catastrophic love at the heart of it all.
An atmosphere, a place, and a few faces. Four people come together in an abandoned Italian monastery in 1944: the English patient dying slowly from terrible burns; Hana, his young nurse, who believes that anyone who loves her will be destroyed; Caravaggio, another victim of the war, thief or spy, a man who has lost his thumbs; and Kip, a Sikh bomb-disposal expert. As they meet and talk, we learn that the patient is not English but Hungarian. He is Count de Alm sy (Ralph Fiennes), a noted desert explorer, a man who fell in love with a married woman, Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), before the war began, an affair that led to tragedy and the air crash in which Alm sy was burned.
Ondaatje's book is a series of stories or situations not conclusively attached as narrative. For in-stance, Caravaggio in the book has joined the others out of curiosity. On the page, that rather passive presence can be sustained if the writing that explores his thoughts is vivid enough. Onscreen, Caravaggio (played by Willem Dafoe) will be there. Straightaway, he has appearance, voice, a way of moving and watching, things that bypass explanation.
But once he is there, he must have a purpose or a need. Otherwise, he becomes a useless bystander. This is vital to movie adaptations of literature and to storytelling on film as a whole. Everything onscreen must have a point and be information; if not, remove it. So Minghella sought to make Caravaggio dramatic and useful. He gave the character the motive of revenge.
In turn, that helped him place the Alm sy-Katharine affair in a context of espionage and betrayal well suited to the desert war in North Africa. That network of plot does not exist in Ondaatje's book, but it made strings with which Minghella could pull the narrative taut. The operatic quality in film Ondaatje refers to is its ruthless insistence that action resolve character. That may be a grave limitation to film, for it is not how life works. Thus, some may object that Minghella has tidied up Ondaatje's book until a mystical air of uncertainty (or possibility) has vanished. Perhaps film serves an age that craves certainty, whereas the novel challenged a greater openness of mind.
The triumph of the film is one the book inspires: These different strands do make a whole; within the momentous scale of world war, we treasure the intimacy of tiny stories. For just as film has the energy of presence, so it flies on the suggestiveness of association cuts that suddenly join and heal. In this area, both Minghella and Ondaatje pay tribute to the creative work of the editor and sound designer, Walter Much. To take one example of his art, there is a love scene between Alm sy and Katharine in a cramped inner space. (And now I reach for the lightning) Furtive lovers, they have sought refuge in a closet in the British embassy in Cairo as a Christmas party for soldiers and staff goes on in the courtyard outside. The cuckolded husband sweats in a Father Christmas suit. We hear the breathing of the lovers, the sigh of their clothes, the rather fatuous festive singing outside, with bagpipes, carols, and Silent Night in the blaze of noon.
And birds in the eaves of the building, their dainty song complicit with the lovers. It is a staggering gathering of sounds and it is a scene that does not occur in the novel. Because you cant hear books. And in books we do not see faces. Onscreen, though, they are the window to sensibility. With a book, the look of beloved characters shifts to accommodate the several people we know who might inhabit the fictional lives.
But nothing ever settles, and so characters are always intriguingly immaterial or elusive, bending to our nature. The faces of Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas eliminate that mutability and beguile us with inescapable physical attraction. To watch a film is to fall in love; to read a book is to explore human uncertainty. But the known faces, so vast, so sensual, give us so much. Fiennes has an engraved look; Thomas can make herself as glassy as society women of the 1930 s, blas against the lens. That masked air suits their secret lives in the film.
They are both somewhat aloof, people a little fearful of the violence of their inner feelings. Do I gather all this from the actors or the characters? Its not clear; that mingling is essential to the perilous fantasy of movies. Casting is obvious, but that only helps us ignore its small art. Directors seldom have time to direct in the melee of film-making many of their creative decisions are caught up in the casting.
But great actors, great beauties, do not always commune fully. I was never persuaded that Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, say, could be intimates in The Bridges of Madison County. But the sadness of Jeff Bridges and the bitterness in Michelle Pfeiffer made a recipe in The Fabulous Baker Boys. Fiennes and Thomas are a natural couple onscreen, fatalistic enough to see beyond love and the rapture of sex to all the damage. They have a ruefulness in advance that works like magnetic attraction. There is a riveting scene, in the desert at night, in which Katharine tells the circle of explorers a story about a classical king, his wife, and his wifes lover.
She sees Alm sys face in the firelight, watching her (note that in the book, stricken with the moment, he looks away truer yet less cinematic), and she knows that her casual tale has found a fateful listener. In turn, he makes her into a trapped teller. Two faces in the night, seeing and being seen other medium can make such conquests so simply. In their best moments, these faces simply carry the characters. But they carry something else, too: the mystery of film careers. So Fiennes here is a little bit of the Nazi commander and a hint of T.
E. Lawrence (he played that part on British TV), and Thomas is not entirely without that woman who went unloved in Four Weddings and a Funeral. See that load building and you may begin to understand the struggle in movie actors to stay as pure as glass without becoming stars or monsters of self-parody. There is much to admire in the way Minghella and Ondaatje have handled their tricky partnership.
Minghella was nearly a brother to the novelist, yet he had to insist that the film was his. But if The English Patient wins Best Picture (it would be the third for Saul Zaentz), it can also turn the novel into the best-seller it didnt quite manage to be before. What does the author feel now? Michael Ondaatje always enjoyed film. He was well-disposed to the project, and he is generous now that it is done: It is as if people I knew when I was writing a book at midnight full of dreams now appear in a new country in daylight, and the wonder is not so much of how they made that magical journey but that I recognize them so well and that I am once again enthralled by them. That was the gift I never expected.
Ondaatje was often deeply touched to see his world realized, and on the set he noticed how difficult it was for him to see that re-creation and write new lines for his characters. So he was astonished to discover the assurance with which Minghella knew the story and was able to lead the show, answering so many questions from cast and crew. Authors are not used to such fierce, needy collaborators. To Ondaatje, Minghella's prowess seemed like writing while playing tennis at Wimbledon.
So Ondaatje has come away much impressed by the association of film-makers, yet all the more certain that his place is in the desert of lonely creation. Reading and writing are solitary pursuits. To make a film, and to watch it, to be its audience, are things done in company. It may be that as we prefer film or the novel, so we are revealing our own inner disposition to be alone or part of the crowd. Reviews &# 038; Articles Home | New | Principal Players | Media Gallery | Words and Pictures Multimedia | Awards &# 038; Oscars | Tie-Ins Links | Mailing List | New Projects | FAQ In The Last Time I Wrote Paris': Ondaatje's Attempt at Poetic Sequence in Troy Town, Douglas Barbour shows that Ondaatje's interest in mythology, manifested in The English Patient in the image of a man falling burning from the sky (evoking, amongst others, the Greek (Icarus) and the Judeo-Christian (Lucifer) myths, was evident early.
Troy Town is part of Dainty Monsters, his first collection. Barbour observes two significant changes that take place within the early work, changes that Ondaatje would continue to develop in later works. First, his use of Hellenistic myths shift from a conventional to a more subversive treatment and second, his transition from the lyric poems in the first section to the poetic sequence in the later section: This sequence of poems is Ondaatje's first attempt to create a kind of documentary poem, even if the documents are classical myths (111). This transition from purely lyrical separate poems to documentary sequences of poems, suggests Barbour, enacts one of the methods by which poetry made the shift from conventional modernism to postmodernism (107). Furthermore, while Barbour defends Ondaatje's choice of traditional Greek mythology, noting that Hellenic myth is still the most important storehouse for story that most beginning writers can find (109), he adds that the collection reaches for its narrative impulses far beyond Greek mythology into Egypt, the Bible, history, and finally, in Peter, into a kind of invention (109) of contemporary mythology and subversion's of classical mythology. In noting Ondaatje's decision not to include many of the poems from this collection in a later one, Barbour speculates that perhaps Ondaatje chose to reject [these] because they depend so fully upon well-known mythic-literary pretexts without really subverting them (110).
When Saul Zaentz spotted plangent in the first para- graph of Anthony Minghella's original screenplay for The English Patient, he knew it was a deal breaker. Zaentz, a hands-on producer, has specialized in bringing haute culture to the screen without losing money. Among his achievements are the Oscar-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Amadeus, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the brilliant film version of Milan Kunderas novel. Pauline Saul, who could condescend even to Kundera, pronounced the film far superior to the novel, and put Zaentz at the top of the heap for his courage in producing it. The shrewd Zaentz has stayed at the top by knowing the difference between courage and foolhardiness knowing, for example, that it is foolhardy to bring plangent into a negotiation.
But Zaentz recognized that Minghella, who was enthralled by Michael Ondaatje's novel, would have to get more than the fancy words out. The English Patient, winner of Britains prestigious Booker prize, demands much of its readers far more than any film can expect from an audience. The text is non-linear, indeed convoluted, and its style is part of its substance: it is a meditation on memory and historicity, and, in Ondaatje's unique style, an homage to Herodotus. Herodotus Histories is the only possession of Ondaatje's central figure, a badly-burned, amnesiac patient, and provides the inspiration for both his character and the novel. Herodotus, the first western historian, has special appeal for the contemporary imagination. Simultaneously subjective and objective, he included in his great chronicle all sorts of seemingly irrelevant folk tales and narratives which have since become a historical treasure trove, equal in importance to his factual account of the wars between the Greeks and Persians.
Twenty-five centuries later, Herodotus reads like a postmodern, constructing historical reality as a series of narratives told by different people from different perspectives the right book for the English patient, though not a big selling point for the moguls at Twentieth Century Fox. Readers of Ondaatje's novel did not have to get the Herodotus connection, but they did need to bring to the text a certain poetic quality of mind. Much of the novel is prose poetry and readers must capture the nuances, supply the transitions, and relish the task of deciphering the obscured storylines that Ondaatje has interwoven and told in different voices. If, however, the fragments of Ondaatje's labyrinthine storyline are assembled in more prosaic orders they must be for a commercial filth plot seems far-fetched and almost all the characters appear neurotically twisted and perverse. Moreover, in addition to its elaborate literary style and portrayal of Proustian sado-masochistic relationships, The English Patient has a non-Eurocentric sensibility: the only unglazed figure left standing at the end of the novel is Kip, a Punjabi Sikh who bears a message of political protest from the Third World. These are all formidable obstacles to a commercial screenplay.
No surprise, then, that it took three years of rewriting by Minghella, abetted by brainstorming sessions with Zaentz and Ondaatje himself, to create the kind of script Zaentz thought he could sell to a studio. They must have experienced many desperate moments along the way as they found themselves exonerating the novel and rearranging the entrails. In the end, Minghella succeeded by drastically reworking the novels story line, partially untwisting its characters, and transforming The English Patient into a sumptuous feast of cinematography and a romantic saga. Ondaatje claims that Minghella (who also directed the film) has preserved the spirit of the novel. The film does retain some of the books homage to Herodotus and convoluted structure, shuttling back and forth between Northern Italy at the end of World War II, where the English patient is being cared for after a plane crash, and the Sahara desert in the years before the war, where he is Count Last Almasy, a member of a Royal Geographic Society expedition. Still, the screenplay of The English Patient is not a text that improves on serious reflection.
That is true of many great films: The film medium conveys better the grandeur of Rome than the glory of Greece, and the camera is and should be the star. Minghella's screenplay does have one indisputable virtue: it is a marvelous vehicle for the actors. Ralph Fiennes as the English patient/Count Almasy, Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs. Clifton, Juliet Binoche as Hana the nurse, and Willem Dafoe as David Caravaggio all give brilliant performances. Ironically, Zaentz and Minghella lost their studio deal by insisting on this superb casting. Fox thought that the screenplay would need celebrity actors with guaranteed box-office appeal.
Zaentz was courageous in his obstinacy and Miramax, a division of Disney, bailed out the expensive production, which was filmed on location in Italy and Tunisia. (The production built the Saul Zaentz Highway into the Sahara to get all the equipment on-site for the Cave of Swimmers, which figures importantly in the film. ) But if Minghella's film matches the novels original spirit, that success is due more to its splendid visual quality than its narrative. The English Patient is stunning, filled with archetypal, exotic, and oneiric images. The film contrasts the browns of the desert with the greens of Northern Italy, the scarified face of the burned English patient with the handsome profile of the Count. Constantly finding creative camera angles and perspectives, the cinematography intrigues and fascinates from the opening scene.
And it sustains that intensity for more than two and a half hours. The English Patient begins with a close-up of a painters brush drawing exotic figures on a textured surface. We have no idea who the painter is or what the figures represent. Eventually we will learn that Katherine Clifton is the painter and that she is copying figures from the walls of the cave of swimmers real cave discovered by European explorers of the desert between the two world wars. Ondaatje's story was loosely based on historical events and characters who were involved in Saharan expeditions.
Minghella makes them into a team whose members are of diverse nationalities; united in their love of the desert, they will be torn apart by the outbreak of World War II. Count Almasy, the expedition leader, falls desperately and passionately in love with Katherine Clifton almost as soon as the recent bride arrives with her husband to join the expedition. Mr. and Mrs. Clifton are jaunty upper-crust British who fly into the desert in a yellow biplane, supposedly a wedding present from Katherine's parents. (In reality it has been supplied by the British Government: her new husband is a British spy assigned to make aerial maps of the desert for use in the impending war. ) The cave of swimmers, which Almasy discovers, plays a central role in the Almasy-Clifton love affair and the arcane drawings that begin the film will eventually reveal their significance. Like the novel, the film has a quasi-musical structure in which intriguing images are introduced and only later developed and explained.
Even the desert is at first unrecognizable, presented initially as an abstract undulating surface. Viewed through the distanced lens of the camera, the barren beauty of the desert landscape gradually reveals itself. The sand dunes shaped into hillocks by the passage of the winds fill the screen. Between the eye of the camera and this forbidding landscape comes a fragile propeller-driven biplane. We can barely discern a female figure slumped lifelessly in the front seat and behind her the pilot.
The plane, which seems pitifully unequal to the Sahara, is brought down in flames by German anti-aircraft guns. A camel caravan of Arabs pull one survivor out of the wreckage who is burned beyond recognition. Saved by native healers, he is the English patient. Almasy, amnesiac after the crash, recovers his memory in bits and pieces as the film flashes back and forth between the abandoned Italian monastery where Hana nurses him and the desert expedition before the war, until we finally understand the obscure but beautiful beginning. Minghella needed more than splendid visual beauty, however, to win his audience. Apart from its literary and psychological complexities, the problem with Ondaatje's novel is that it fizzles to an end rather than reaching a dramatic conclusion; even worse, the novels last chapters center on Kip, and American moviegoers are unlikely to identify with a Punjabi Sikh. (Ondaatje himself was born in Sri Lanka, so it would not be amiss to suggest he has put something of himself into the character. ) Kip is a familiar if not stereotypical colonial, torn between identifying with what is best in the admirable English and chafing under their imperial arrogance.
While he often compares himself with his older brother, who despised the English as an article of faith, Kip has risked his life in their war, volunteering as a sapper who defuses bombs and disarms booby traps. A lieutenant, his technical efficiency has earned him the complete respect of his English non-commissioned officers. In the novel Hana comes to the dark-skinned Kip as to a river for its cool relief. His service to Britain and his affair with the nurse, psychological reflections of one other, dissolve into rage when he hears that white people have dropped their atomic bombs on Japan. On this note of third world solidarity, Kip fires up his Triumph motorcycle and sets off on a journey that almost kills him. It is impossible to know how Ondaatje meant his readers to understand Kips reaction.
Does he expect us to believe that in 1945 there would have been such Third World solidarity between South Asia and Japan? Perhaps, but it seems to me that Ondaatje is intentionally anachronistic. He wants us to see that all history, all memory, is revisionist and that all wars appear in retrospect as tragic mistakes in which men, confused about their identities, fall upon their brothers. Indeed, he is so overcome by his passion for revenge that he almost kills the already burned and helpless English patient, who is not even English. In playing with time and identity, Ondaatje pays further homage to Herodotus. The other narrative of the novel which involves Hana, the English patient, and the spy, thief, and morphine addict David Caravaggiocollapses into unfinished ambiguity.
We are led to assume that Hana, for whom the English patient was an obvious father figure (her own father was burned to death fighting in France), will never be capable of intimate love with a man. David Caravaggio, another father figure for Hana, is in fact her fathers friend, whose erotic interest in her she had recognized since girlhood. We never learn what happens to him, nor are we told how the English patient dies. Unlike the movie, which ends when Hana gives her patient a lethal injection to stop his suffering, Ondaatje's text has no final scene. If the novel leaves us with any psychological message it is that western civilization has left its members incapable of human love. This is not a new idea, and it is surely not appealing to escapist movie audiences.
Minghella had to remove this large plangent from the heart of Ondaatje's novel. For starters, he eliminated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and made Kip a compliant colonial who initiates the affair with Hana and then leaves her because he is emotionally broken by the booby trap death of his British sergeant. But Minghella's real coup was to make the relationship between Count Almasy and the newlywed Mrs. Clifton into a 19 th-century adulterous romance, shades of Stendhal's The Red and the Black: love is a passion only in adultery.
On Ondaatje's pages Almasy is an older man whom Mrs. Clifton takes strange sadistic pleasure in battering during their erotic encounters. This father-figure perversity, which runs through the novel, is Electra-led in the film. On screen, Hana, Mrs. Clifton, Caravaggio, the English patient, and Kip are all the same age.
Minghella makes Mrs. Clifton into one of those women who makes the mistake of marrying for reasons that are sensible but have nothing to do with love. Then she meets a man, Count Almasy, who sets her aflame the heart is an organ of fire is the phrase taken from the novel. The Count, who is for Mrs. Clifton the exotic other, is equally passionate. He struggles to be a gentleman, urging her husband not to leave her in the desert when he is called away from the expedition for several days.
But when Mrs. Clifton and the Count are marooned together by a sandstorm, their restraints are overthrown. The scenes between them are erotically compelling without ever becoming vulgar. Minghella does everything in his considerable creative powers to make the audience sympathize with these two people who seem so perfectly matched.
We feel their passion is stronger and more pure because it is forbidden. As the Count/English patient, Ralph Fiennes is the center of two love affairs. Mrs. Clifton loves the handsome count with a violent, profane, uncontrollable passion that eventually leads to her death. Hana comes to love the English patient in a sacred and tender way when his whole face is an ugly scar, and she is healed by the experience. Fiennes is equally compelling as the impetuous lover and the bitter pedantic patient: it is difficult to imagine any living actor who could have brought more to this double romance.
Everyone involved in this film has reason to feel satisfied with even proud of their accomplishments. But one comes back to Minghella, who refused to succumb to Ondaatje's conclusion about the impossibility of love, re imagined his story as a romantic saga, and invented a sad but hopeful ending for it. When Hana finally leaves the monastery gripping Herodotus Histories in her hands, we know that she is a survivor ready to discover the world. As the truck carrying her away passes a row of poplar trees, the camera turns them into flashes of green and the film ends as it began with a poetic visual image. This is not Ondaatje's novel, but he is right in saying that the film preserves the spirit of his book. Copyright Boston Review, 1997.
Please do not reproduce without permission. As the novel progresses, Ondaatje gives us ever deeper insights into the lives of the quartet while weaving in their relationships to each other. Reading The English Patient is a bit like surfing on the Internet. Ondaatje covers many subjects, some arcane: explorations for ancient sites in the Libyan desert in the 1930 s, archeology, architecture, detailed techniques of defusing bombs, ancient history, and even popular music of the 1930 s. You wont find Ondaatje's rich word pictures in the movie. Here he has Hana, the young nurse, reading to the mysterious bedridden patient: So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.
And here is Hana recalling what it was like working in a field hospital: ... Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying. It was important to remember their names... Some would sit up and rip all their dressings off trying to breathe better. Some would be worried about tiny scratches on their arms when they died... Every damn general should have had my job...
Who the hell were we to be given this responsibility, expected to be wise old priests, to know how to lead people toward something no one wanted and somehow make them feel comfortable... The patient remembers. He is back in the Libyan desert before the war: There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans Ive met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nation less. I came to hate nations.
We are deformed by nation-states. The Asian in Ondaatje relates to Kip, the young Sikh bomb expert: He sat watching and listening, waiting for them to click. The other men silent, fifty yards away. He knew he was for now a king, a puppet master, could order anything, a bucket of sand, a fruit pie for his needs, and those men who would not cross an uncrowded bar to speak with him when they were off duty would do what he desired...
Free research essays on topics related to: back and forth, sri lanka, world war ii, english patient, michael ondaatje
Research essay sample on World War Ii Back And Forth
