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A firmament in the midst of the waters: Dimensions of love in The English Patient

Literature Film Quarterly, 1998 by Stenberg, Douglas

Graves at my command

Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth

By my so potent art. But this rough magic

I here abjure; and when I have requir'd

Some heavenly music (which even now I do)

To work mine end upon their senses that

This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fadoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.

-The Tempest

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What we have now are two stories, one with the pace and detail of a 300 page novel and one that is the length of a vivid and subtle film. Each has its own organic structure. There are obvious differences and values but somehow each version deepens the other And what is most interesting to me about the film now is how scenes and emotions and values from the book emerged in new ways, were re-invented, were invented with totally new moments, and fit within a dramatic arc that was different from the arc of the book. Quite honestly now the territories and maps are blurred as to what is new, what is mine, what was Anthony's, what was Saul [Zaentz] or Ralph Fiennes or Juliette Binoche, what was Walter Murch. What you have is a communal story made by many hands.

-Michael Ondaatje, "About Anthony Minghella's Screenplay"

For Anthony Minghella, The English Patient

is above all a romantic film.... Almasy and Katharine, the central protagonists ... feel a fatal inevitability to their love. It's as if an irresistible force is bringing them together and they're helpless in the face of their destiny. And their destiny is affected by everything around them . . . a love story complicated by war, a spy story complicated by love. But it's told with scale because the nature of love in the film has repercussions over time and continents. It's about tiny details on a big canvas ("Press Kit" 12).

Critics have tended to agree. Janet Maslin writes that "Anthony Minghella's beautiful film told love stories while it also reinvented the romance of the big screen" (C9) and Joseph McBride considers the film "a multilayered story of an ill-fated love affair . . . a haunting, beautifully crafted mood piece about the vagaries of love against the backdrop of World War II" ("The Patient Englishman"). For Time, the "lovers are Ralph Fiennes-all coiled sexiness, threat shrouded in hauteur-and Kristen Scott Thomas, who has the gift of making intelligence erotic; they come together in a dance of doom that is abrasive, mysterious, powerful, inevitable" ("The Best Cinema of 1996" 72).

Romance is unquestionably the catalyst for the worlds Ondaatje and Minghella summon and release. And indeed, their creative fusion reveals dimensions and motifs of natural phenomena reflected over the ages: water flows through time, bodies merge with landscapes, hands reach across history, and shadows dance with light as memory is unearthed. Through all this, both the writer and the director reveal that lovers, in order to sound the depths of their experience, may share a life illuminated by their sensitivity to time and history. Thus, human experience is translated against the kaleidoscope of time and space. As George Hatza writes,

The discovery of prehistoric cave paintings in the desert mirror frescoes painted on the walls of an Italian church-both sites separated by time and a war, in which two different couples fall in love . . . the swirling hills of the desert segue into the folded topography of the bed linens clinging to a patient under the care of a French-Canadian nurse during the waning days of World War II. (A9)

Minghella considers Ondaatje's novel "an enormously emotional reservoir, this well of feeling" (CBS Sunday Morning). His statement that he "had plunged into the well of [the novel]" only to discover that "there was a film there" (Smith 22) hints at the motif of water essential to both works. The opening of the film has the newly painted replica of a swimmer merging with the waves of dunes in a desert sea. Almasy lies in cave water as the Bedouin doctor applies balm to his charred face. Later, Almasy echoes Katharine's plea that she is "dying for rain." Hana goes over his torso with a washcloth in keeping with Ondaatje's novel: "Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet.... Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint" (3). She declares, "It's raining," before Almasy is joyfully taken on a stretcher around the pool in the middle of a downpour. During Almasy's seaside interview, he looks into Hana's eyes as he drinks water from the container she holds. Likewise, Katharine in her pearls has lived by the sea: "She was always happier in rain, in bathrooms steaming with liquid air, in sleepy wetness, climbing back in from his window that rainy night in Cairo and putting on her clothes while still wet, in order to hold it all" (170). When Hana is suspended in the cathedral, she seems to be floating and swimming as a shadowy echo of the figures in the Cave of Swimmers. And Kip himself, in the scene from the novel which inspired Hana's ascent, "was now aware of the depth of this church, not its height. The liquid sense of it. The hollowness and darkness of a well" (72). Finally, Hana's tear is the last image of water in the film before she looks toward the waves of light along the road from the monastery.

A firmament in the midst of the waters: Dimensions of love in The English Patient

Literature Film Quarterly, 1998 by Stenberg, Douglas

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