Director Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient (2006), winner of numerous international film festival, critics and technical awards, is next week’s Classic Tuesdays film and will be on at 6 pm at the National Gallery, Castellani House, Vlissengen Road, Georgetown.
According to the gallery, Minghella himself adapted the 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel by Sri-Lankan-Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, a many-layered drama of romantic love and betrayal, the brutality of injury and death during war, and the physical, psychological and emotional change that this engenders. A first rate cast and brilliant filmmaking including breathtaking cinematography partly on location in North Africa, editing and music, made for a memorable production.
In the central story set in the closing months of World War II, French-Canadian nurse Hana (Juliet Binoche) cares for a badly burned patient in an abandoned villa in Italy. Thought to be English, he is in fact a Hungarian aristocrat, Count László de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), contracted prior to the war by the Royal Geographic Society to head a team of archaeologists mapping the deserts of Egypt and Libya. The story of how he came to his present state, including his passionate affair with Katherine Clifton (Kristen Scott Thomas), the wife of one of his team, is told in flashbacks, and intermingles with that of Hana’s own story of loss and that of a British Sikh bomb disposal expert (Naveen Andrews) to whom she becomes attached, as well as that of a former prisoner-of-war (Willem Dafoe), tortured by the Germans, whose arrival at the villa turns out not to be a chance encounter.
The film won a total of 50 awards internationally, including 9 Oscars, 2 Golden Globe awards, 6 BAFTA (British Film) awards, and another 30-odd nominations: with several wins for Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Supporting Actress awards for Binoche, with further awards for Best Sound and Art Direction, and several nominations for Best Actor/Actress for Fiennes and Thomas.
Minghella died unexpectedly in early 2008 after successful cancer surgery, following a multi-talented career marked by UK and international recognition, as a playwright and theatre and television director, prior to his filmmaking, and subsequently as an opera director.
The film is 2 hours and 40 minutes long and admission is free.
