THE ENGLISH PATIENT

Overlong and self-important, "The English Patient" has the bad 
habit of wearing its symbolism on its sleeve. Beautiful 
photography and good acting ultimately save it and it climbs, 
by its fingernails, into the ranks of romance classics.

Juliet Binoche plays Hana, a French-Canadian nurse in Italy at 
the close of World War II. In her charge is a badly burned 
amnesiac, stoically played by Ralph Finennes, the titular 
"patient," who is actually turns out to be a Hungarian Count. 
As she sets up house for them both in an abandoned, pictaresque 
Italian villa, this Count Almasy, feuled by Hana's morphine and 
tender affection, begins having flashbacks of his torrid affair 
with the wife of another man during an expedition in the Sahara; 
an expedition called short by the outbreak of the war.  Katherine, 
the object of the count's flashbacked desire, is superbly fleshed 
out by Kristin Scott Thomas. She brings a fierce sexual cunning 
to the proceedings, saving the film from being the long snooze 
it might have been.

The film veers unsteadily back and forth from these sun and
sex-drenched flashbacks to Almasy's current predicament in Italy. 
His idyllic life of having Juliette and lots of morphine to himself 
is shattered with the arrival of the mysterious Willem DaFoe, who 
soon is having (much less erotic) flashbacks of his own, and a 
swarthy Sikh minesweeper who becomes Binoche's love interest. 
These characters are only important to the film's core romance 
in a very abstract way and they can't compete with the more 
"sweeping" elements of the flashbacks. Ultimately, the story 
line begins to feel over-stuffed. 

Even the really succulent slices of romance on display here can 
go overboard at times.  The symbolism of war, cave paintings, 
unexplored deserts and disfiguration as refelctions of love and 
the unfathomable mysteries of the human heart and so forth are 
obvious enough at times as to induce groaning. In one scene 
Almasy rubs his hands along Katherine's naked body with the 
same entranced fascination he feels on discovering forgotten 
caves-- he gazes at her sternum like he's discovered an 
archealogical revelation, and the inferred metaphor of the 
desert landscape as a human body, or love as a vast and 
unexplored cave, is delivered with such a heavy-hand it 
almost bludgeons the audience. Then there's the "sweeping" 
element! A "sweeping romance!" More often than not it becomes 
obvious this sweepingness is all the film feels it has to offer. 
One of the more powerfully romantic scenes, for example, is 
severly dampened when a sentimental rush of orchestration swells 
so quickly and gaudily up from the soundtrack that one's 
heartstrings can't help but shrink back in disgust against 
such obvious tugging. 11/96