The English Patient received twelve nominations at the 69th Academy Awards, and came away with nine golden gongs, including the illustrious prizes for Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Picture. But twenty years later is this epic romance – framed in the shell of a monastery in the dying days of the Italian Campaign of World War II – still flighty or passionate enough to stir the emotions, or is it the sort of thing you’d watch reluctantly, strapped literally or figuratively to a sick person’s bed?
At 162 minutes it certainly feels like a very long movie. But just as The English Patient eschews the calculations of war for the sake of personal drama, let us put aside all these numbers and focus instead on its themes. They include love versus lust, ardent devotion mixed with wanton betrayal, and the faithlessness of memory alongside the heady passing of time, but most pertinently of all the forgotten art of cartography, once the preserve of intrepid explorers with their expensive equipment, noble titles, and glossily continental multi-barrelled names, now superseded by the recessively antisocial, computer nerds with their 360-degree cameras and Google cars.
The ‘English’ patient himself is of course a phallic symbol, with a well-trimmed exterior but a swarthy, sensual essence bubbling just underneath. Whether it is surveying across Egypt and Libya or pressing his finger firmly into the suprasternal notch, he has a fervent compulsion for discovery and conquest. Switching affiliation between the Allies and Axis powers, he remains faceless to all but the one that he loves. And when he loses her he is left literally disfigured, his burned face reminiscent of nothing more than the bulbous and veiny, peeled-back male glans.
