"The English Patient" Retrospective: A Song of Sand And Seinfeld

Sorry, Elaine, but I'll take this romance over "Sack Lunch" any day.

April 20, 2023

On March 13, 1997, 31 million people watched Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes detest The English Patient with such intense loathing that the world would forever view it in the same light.

It was a resurrection of the old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama, a sweeping romantic epic lensed with stunning cinematography set in a faraway land, where two people find one another in ethically questionable passion. It was intimate and contemplative, passionate but subdued. Its vision was ambitious and spiritual effect profound.

Then, Elaine, arm in arm with a personified wooden plank, derided The English Patient. She preferred Sack Lunch, a comedy whose question of whether the cast got shrunken into a paper bag or stood in a giant sack seemed more compelling than any the WWII romance posed.

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Yet, for all the retrospective mockery, there is little genuine acknowledgment. It is an exercise in togetherness that we condemn The English Patient as an insufferable bore, feigning meaning while simmering with cynical sentimentality and manipulative clichés.

In fairness, it is manipulative. While beautiful, Gabriel Yared’s score is so condescending it borders on insult. The film exploits abstraction to appear more meaningful than it is: Almásy and Katharine lie in a bathtub, exchanging abstract inquiries into the other’s worldview; he beckons her with sensual musings about writing with "her taste in his mouth,” and they bicker after she ends their affair by exchanging many meaningless declarations.

Seinfeld, and therefore audiences, got much right, but what we got wrong is the shift from comedic irony to a genuine belief that the fate of people stuck in a sack was more interesting than the foundational idea of The English Patient:

“A thing is still a thing no matter what you put in front of it.”

Count László de Almásy, who is in the desert for... some reason... rebuts Katharine Clifton’s critique of his monograph: wonderment that a man could pen a paper with "so few adjectives." A car is a car; a chair is a chair; a plane is a plane. Almásy, a man of few words but quiet, pointed, direct intensity, sees no need to pretend otherwise.

Katharine, a romantic, rebuts how any romantic would: “love.” It is different to feel for a lover the way one would a father or an uncle or the very objects Almásy refuses to describe. He concedes.

So begins a forbidden romance between a man enslaved to his self-imposed emotional limitations and a woman living a life she didn’t ask for with a man she doesn’t love.

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There’s a quiet momentum constantly at play, a subdued sense of urgency that lulls you into contemplation, even when there’s less to contemplate than the movie believes. There are fundamental ideas present in The English Patient: love and loyalty, friendship and honor, duty and destiny, and whether any of those things can genuinely coexist; but for all the reliance on concept, this is love, in more ways than we care to admit: a generality that’s nearly impossible to quantify, no matter how much specificity we lend to the object of our affections.

In one scene, Almásy, deeply resistant to feeling and seemingly impervious to sentiment, drives Katharine, an inquisitive romantic of quiet sensuality, through the Sahara desert. The two have interacted sparingly, only the exchange about his colorless paper and a campfire game where Katharine tells a story that mirrors her impending romance with Almásy: an ancient queen gets gazed upon by a lustful man (whom her husband trusts), who kills the king and takes her as his own.

She breaks the silence by asking, “Why?” Why is a Hungarian count driving through the African desert on a map-making expedition?

For those who resist vulnerability, there is no more powerful weapon than a question: a small moment where someone tries to get in without intent or benefit.

It breaks him. When a sandstorm traps the two in a car together, Almásy soothes Katharine with stories of fabled winds, including one so dense that it gets mistaken for a torrent of blood. He’s opened to her, not with dramatic revelations of troubled youth or grand pronouncements of his growing affections, but in a way that’s true to him.

Despite its pretensions, The English Patient is more natural than most love stories. The affection is born from unforeseen circumstances and blossoms when they see what they need in someone they did not expect.

It’s honest and earnest, not only in legitimizing its romance's existence with a narrative weight that justifies and condemns their love but also in illuminating how often love shows how little we know ourselves.

Convention sees Katharine marry a loyal and devoted childhood friend and move to the desert, thousands of miles from her native English countryside. She chooses to mask her unhappiness, and the film never pretends otherwise. It does say that the status quo does silent damage that only true love can expose, and ourselves in the process.

In truth, it’s Almásy, fervent in abandoning morality for passion and loyalty for love, that’s the true romantic, ultimately projecting onto Katharine the “ownership” he fears, laying claim to her body and entitlement to her passion. He demands she feign illness to set up a midday excursion in a tucked-away cupboard. He walks her through the marketplace where he once encouraged her to bargain for a lower price, acknowledging the change she’s inspired in him by refusing to do so himself. Katharine, in reality, is the fearful skeptic, unsure of their forbidden romance, throwing herself into Almásy's arms one moment and ending the affair the next. Love has transformed them into the very things they destroyed in each other.

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But it never behaves as though the consequences of their actions are self-contained. David Caravaggio, a thief for the British army, comes to the Italian monastery where Hana is tending to the dying Almásy, burned in the plane crash shown at the start. Initially, he is shrouded in mystery but gradually reveals his motives: avenge his dismemberment by finding the man who gave the Germans the maps they used to infiltrate Cairo.

Is it naive to pretend that a man will forgive such transgressions because the person responsible was in love? Yes, but The English Patient acknowledges that not all can get forgiven. Geoffrey doesn’t forgive. Corrupted by his grief, he flies a plane with Katharine as passenger and nearly kills Almásy in an attempted double murder-suicide.

Madox, Almásy's closest friend, commits suicide upon learning his best friend sold their maps to the Nazis. The whole picture may have been enough for Caravaggio but not Geoffrey, and although he only had a part of it, not for Madox.

The English Patient gives us the many gifts of a romantic epic. It is a feast for the eyes. The desert gets bronzed by the evening sky as Almásy flies Katharine from the cave she died in, cold and alone. The music (for all its manipulation) is heartbreaking as he gently pushes the morphine vials toward Hana, begging for death. The performances are fantastic, from Juliette Binoche as Hana slowly falls for Kip in a romance heightened by the danger of his job as a bomb defuser to Scott Thomas as a woman wracked with guilt over her indiscretions but unable to stop herself from giving in to passion.

But, ultimately, the film is a light cast on love and how, for all the ways it creates and destroys, builds and topples, there is a principle: it can only do so much.

Dying in the Cave of Swimmers from injuries sustained in the plane crash, Katharine tells Almásy of her home and the elaborate funeral she envisioned for herself, of her desire to get buried in the garden with a view of the sea.

Almásy walks for three days through the desert without water. He gets captured and kills a man to escape. He does all he can but cannot reach her in time. Love is only a part of the world, and the world will not grant her wish. Ultimately, love cannot absolve if it itself is the crime. Simply because you love someone does not mean you can do all they ask of you, all you want to do. It cannot conquer all, but that does not change the truth: love is love.

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It can be familial, platonic, romantic, virtuous, sensual, or forbidden, but it will move us regardless. It will sell maps to the Germans, fly us back to the cave and carry the ones we love out into the palace of winds. In a torrid affair that skewers the heart and plunges the world into war, we can condemn it for its immorality, for its beneficiaries plucking fruit from the forbidden tree. What we cannot do is lend Elaine’s scathing dismissal credence. Ultimately, it proves just as true after everyone suffers the consequences as before any of them even seemed possible: a thing is still a thing, no matter what you put in front of it.