War is hell. That’s what The English Patient wants to tell its viewers (well, that and a couple of other things that we’ll get to later). All of the lives portrayed in the film are destroyed, horribly altered, or at the very least highly inconvenienced by World War II. Spoiler alert! People die in this movie. They blow up. They burn up. They crash down. They break down and commit suicide. It’s not a pretty picture. Hana, a nurse with the Allied Forces, laments that she “must be a curse” because anyone who loves or gets too close to her is killed. Still, when a severely burned and dying patient is no longer able to stand conditions aboard a medical transport vehicle that Hana is supervising, she volunteers–or, demands, actually–to stay behind at an abandoned Italian monastery to tend him until he passes. When the patient asks why she does this, Hana can only tell him it’s “because [she’s] a nurse.” It’s an interesting paradox: a woman who believes everyone she loves dies and who is fed up with being surrounded by death freely offers to attach herself to yet another mortally wounded human and immerse herself in more death.
We viewers only watch Hana’s tender moments with her declining patient for half the movie; the rest of the film is the backstory of the nameless burn victim, who remembers the past few years in fragments as different visuals and the snippets of Herodotus Hana reads him trigger his memory. Although the patient is somewhat witty and at times even rather talkative while in the monastery, in his past life he was the brooding, melancholy, often irascible Count Almasy, who was on assignment with various others to map routes through the imposing African deserts and wilderness. This mission alone would make a fascinating story as the cartographers are unaware at first that their countries intend to rely on their work for moving troops during the as-yet nameless war that looms over them all. But any focus Almasy may have on his work is forgotten when the spunky Katharine Clifton joins up with the expedition. As soon as Almasy and Katharine are in the same frame in the film, it’s clear that they are physically attracted to each other. The thing is, Katharine is married to Geoffrey, who also joins the expedition periodically. But Almasy certainly never cares that Katharine is already attached; and Katharine herself, despite her declarations of love for her husband, never seems to really mind too much the idea and later the fact of cheating on poor Geoffrey with Almasy.
Ah, yes. Just like next week’s film, Titanic, The English Patient portrays infidelity as true love. Or, it tries to do so. The relationship between Almasy and Katharine takes center stage in the film–dominating the dying thoughts of Hana’s burn patient (again, that’s Almasy) and coloring Hana’s own romantic endeavors with the mysterious Indian-British sapper named Kip. But all the film’s efforts to convince its audience that Almasy and Katharine are perfect for each other and destined to be together fall flat when one steps back from all the poetics and passion and observes that their relationship is selfish, heartless, and ultimately destructive to all those around them.
In fact, most of The English Patient can be said to show the catastrophic results of being unfaithful to one’s spouse (or being the party who participates with one who is being unfaithful), preoccupied with one’s own pleasures, and willingly ignorant of the effects one’s actions have on others. Additional spoiler alert: Nothing goes well for Almasy and Katharine or their friends after they start their affair. Caravaggio loses his thumbs, his confidence, and his self-control. Madox commits suicide. Geoffrey attempts murder and suicide, succeeding at both. Katharine dies a horribly prolonged death alone in a dark cave. And, of course, Almasy also lingers in agony as Hana’s tortured burn victim–until he persuades Hana to give him an overdose of morphine to put him out of his misery, his death ironically connecting to a message Katharine scrawled on a wrapper and stuck in his beloved copy of Herodotus: “The heart is an organ of fire.” Almasy let his heart, or what he believed was his heart, rule him; and in the end it literally consumed him–and destroyed everyone else.
For Me Then…
It would be easy to label all the unfaithfulness, death, and sadness in The English Patient as side-effects of the war. If war is hell (and it is), then surely it is understandable that people act differently when caught up in a war. But, in this film World War II fades into the background of the characters’ personal lives. They loom large, and it only whispers around them. It doesn’t matter to Almasy and Katharine that nations are in conflict. If anything, it is an inconvenience to them, especially to Almasy at the end of the film when he is waylaid by the English and suspected of being a spy, while trying to return to the fatally wounded Katharine. Whereas in films like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan we see people reach outside of themselves for the greater good of others suffering in the war, The English Patient promotes the self-serving agenda of two people whose relationship is built on lust and nothing more. It’s difficult to pity such individuals when one remembers that millions are dying in death camps at the same time they are spending all their energy trying to conceal and carry on their dalliance.
As for Hana, her part of the film confuses me. She feels deep affection for both her patient Almasy and her lover Kip, but she lets them both go: Almasy through her assistance in his suicide, and Kip when his next assignment takes him elsewhere. While for most of the film she is determined to help both men live as long as possible, in the end she is happy and at peace with releasing them. I haven’t quite figured out why. Perhaps she comes to realize that truly loving someone means being able to let them go. If we apply this idea to Almasy and Katharine, we get another reason why their love is doomed from the start: it is more of an obsession, a need to possess each other. They cannot let each other go. If there is nothing more important to oneself than one’s romantic partner and satisfying one’s fleshly desires, then life loses its meaning. It constricts and becomes an endless cycle of secrecy and paranoia. And that sounds pretty hellish too.
