Anthony Minghella
The English Patient

Wednesday, January 18, 2012, Rai Movie at 9:05 PM: a special evening, perhaps... I would add.

A film from 1996, or 1997? It doesn't really matter, it won 9 sacred statuettes, the Oscars. If you’ve seen it, you watch it again, if you’ve never seen it, you’d better get ready: 162 minutes, not all entirely splendid, encapsulating the stories of characters out of time, out of common thought, out of their very own life habits, at least until the moment of awareness of the inevitable, which will lead them to fly in search of the dreamed freedom and like moths drawn to light, will lead them to their own physical destruction.

But why do I emphasize physical?... well, because that’s what it is about: they are two people who find themselves inseparably bound by a feeling that initially, although differently, he disdainful and provocative [I hate being owned!], she foolishly a female offended by the truth, try to stem, but, alas, in vain! Only words will remain, the memory, the images evoked by the painful memory of losing a part of oneself, his Katharine, in that cave that first becomes shelter and then a grave.

This is the crux of the story for the writer: a love story trying to make its way through countless real hurdles, the war, and false ones, the hypocrisy of good English society in the late thirties.

Between North Africa and Tuscany, the story takes shape with a truly original temporal alternation, indeed flashbacks are used non-sequentially, relying on the emotional wave, rather than the wave of memories in order of occurrence.

The Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almasy, a cartographer for Her Britannic Majesty, meets Katharine, already married to an English correspondent, in North Africa during the Second World War; between the two, a spark ignites that will lead them to a tragic end. All of this is recounted to us by a person who doesn’t have a clear identity at the beginning of the film but is known as "the English patient", a man disfigured and unrecognizable, who after the fall of his plane has been kept alive thanks to the diligent care of a young Canadian nurse (the setting is that of a calm and tranquil monastery in the Sienese countryside).

All the other characters form the background, as do the other intertwining stories, but they don’t manage to make you lose the thread of the main story.

The cinematography is very beautiful, breathtaking aerial shots, use of sequence shots with a blurred effect, accompanying you in the atraumatic transition between indoor and outdoor environments, waves of sand transforming into soft, flowing folds of sheets on a disheveled bed...

If one were to look for the prototype of an Oscar-winning film, even without being a masterpiece in the strict sense, I think The English Patient is the right one, even if for many it is a film too long, too romantic and with an ending [too poignant]: I can only add that after many years I remembered very well all the main scenes, but I belong to the category "stupid and romantic English woman".