The English Patient

I am not putting on a photo of the movie, released in 1996 by Miramax and adapted and directed by Anthony Minghella. When I first saw it I disliked it a lot without being able to explain my reaction. After I have read the novel, I despise the movie all the more. 

For the novel I have some conflicting feelings. Indeed it is split into two halves: the pre-war years in Cairo and the desert where the extramarital affair between Katharine Clifton and the Hungarian explorer Almasy took place; and 1945 (the present) at an abandoned Tuscan villa where the nurse Hana, her father's friend Caravaggio, a Sikh bomb disposal specialist Kirpal Singh, and a burned, dying Almasy converge. 

The question in my mind was always why these two halves. There is very little apparent thematic connection between the two couples and relationships. One is obsessive and violent and destructive. The other is equal and uncomplicated and healing. One is fundamentally cliched and carries a whiff of rottenness, while the other is raw and young.

The movie gave me the initial impression that Minghella was trying to sell a stale love triangle story as a grand, epic, and simple tragedy. No matter how glossy it is presented, I just can't get the rotten smell out of my nostril. I am not at all against adultery in art, but this is a week-old fish left out of the refrigerator. When you come at such a century-old plot, shouldn't you try to inject some new blood? The "new blood" injected here comes in the form of weird exoticism from Naveen Andrews making love to Juliet Binoche. In the movie, this subplot seems tacked on and awkward. Too much to be a sidebar and too little to compete with the main storyline.

Unfortunately, the novel does not help much in this aspect. The Almasy chapters still leave a bad taste in my mouth. At some point I realized why. These chapters are entirely told from Almasy's point of view. We get none of Katharine's point of view, even though there is a chapter named for her and gives a few pages that appear to be her point of view but have to have been filtered through him. The only thing that could potential save this story from these frustrating and suffocating cliches is the sinister undercurrent that is buried in Almasy's account. He insists that she left him out of conscience and loyalty for her marriage or perhaps fear of her husband (whatever, it's very vague), but her dialogs suggest that she was angry because she could not be more than a secret mistress to him. There is a general feeling of deceit in his overall account, but I won't go there for now. 

Staleness aside, I just find the movie adaptation to be so gigantically ironic. Out of curiosity, I skimmed a number of book reviews, and maybe one out of 10 has a throwaway mention of the unpleasant factoid that Almasy is a Nazi. Throughout the novel, Almasy struggles to conceal this fact, going so far as talking about himself in the third person. That he worked for German spies in the desert for 3 years is revealed only by Caravaggio's exposition. (Yeah, plotting is not a strong point of this novel.) Almasy implies that he decided to help the Axis as a revenge for Katharine's death ("[Rommel] was a brilliant man..."). The real-life Almasy, on which the character is based, was in fact quite active in German army during the war.

Minghella was sensitive to the inconvenient element, and skillfully revised it to some harmless excuse for his "collaboration" with the Germans that even the novel Almasy is unable to cook up out of self-interest. He knew that he must protect the audience from any uneasiness. Adultery is already pushing their limits. 

Indeed the movie unabashedly centers around Almasy's love affair. If Minghella really loved the novel and wanted to adapt it faithfully, he could have made a WWII "The Hurt Locker." Hana's storyline equally shares the intensity with Almasy in the first half, but Kirpal Singh's storyline dominates the second half of the novel. Everything is compelling -- the strength of the character, the thrilling details of bomb disposal, the emotional ambiguity, the cultural conflicts -- which contrasts with the tired cliches in Almasy's half. But Minghella did not want that story.

I don't really know why he kept a shadow of the Hana-Kip storyline in the movie at all. Maybe he liked the framing device. It remains the less stale part of the movie, but we also get a clear sense that the two young characters are there to serve Almasy's story. The irony lies in the fact that Ondaatje is making a similar observation in Singh's story. The throughline is how he has served the Allies for 5 years, risking gruesome death every day. This is a betrayal of his own country, India, and his older brother, who is thrown in jail by the British colonial government. But he loves his English mentors and comrades and amiably suffers the discrimination and hostility from British soldiers. Service, intelligence, generosity, courage, all purported virtues of Sikhism. His love for Britain continues until the real climax of the novel, when he finally reaches the breaking point --- 

"American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium and now you have fucking Harry Truman of the USA. You all learned it from the English."

So he splits. From love, from work, from his comrades and employment, from being used and exploited. He goes back to India, where independence will be won in a couple of years. Although Ondaatje is not Indian himself (born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Canada), the shadow of the empire constantly hovers over the four main characters, none of whom is English despite the title. 

Of course, as an English filmmaker selling to an American audience, Minghella carefully scraped away all of this, every little strand of anti-colonialism and every little bit of heroism in the Indian character. Despite the desert scenes, he kept the movie clean from any sand that may seep into the shoes of the British and American consumers to rub against their delicate feet, with the same meticulous attention as Singh dismantles a bomb.

And he was absolutely correct. Imagine the shock and indignation and rage when they read the novel and see the line "They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation." Indeed, the rage erupted, making the novel more controversial in the English-speaking market than the movie was.

I wonder how Ondaatje feels about the movie. He couldn't avoid being appropriated and used by the British after all. 

(PS. There is added irony that Almasy is designated as "Count" in the movie, while he is not identified as aristocracy in the novel. The real-life Almasy called himself "Count" but was in fact a commoner. Well, I guess if being a Nazi doesn't stop him from becoming a big romantic hero, what's a little fake news, eh? And then there is also the little issue of necrophilia ... What a guy.)