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`The English Patient' is an immoral film
For once I have to say that Virginia Bottomley is right
So far, apart from myself, the only people I know of who were unimpressed by the film The English Patient were a few German critics at the Berlin Film Festival, and our own Virginia Bottomley, who alone of all her sex failed to weep at a preview in Paris. She remarked, dry-eyed, that "life is mainly tragic. I'm never surprised when things turn out badly, really". This puts me in an awkward position. Much though I sympathise with the stoic approach to life, so briskly summarised by Mrs Bottomley, I hate to be associated with her, or indeed professional German film critics, on any matter aesthetic. But I am. I saw The English Patient at a preview about a fortnight ago, and was quite astonished. It is not that it's a bad film. On the contrary, it is very good in many ways. With its exotic locations it is dazzlingly sensuous to look at; it's like flipping through the National Geographic on LSD. The acting is superb. Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes are astonishingly beautiful and convey a sexual passion powerful enough to make anybody's heart ache with longing or regret, except perhaps Mrs Bottomley's. The plot is interesting, the language poetic at times, the costumes inspired, and so on. What astonished me was that everyone is taking it so seriously, that this is the film with 13 Oscar nominations, and this is the film that has supposedly defied the commercial traditions of Hollywood, and yet triumphed all the same. It seems to me, having seen the film, that its enormous collection of Oscar nominations and its huge box office success in America are in fact proof that it does in fact conform to the requirements of contemporary Hollywood. For all its talent and elegance, it was superficial and sentimental, and lacked moral perspective. In this sense it excludes itself from the status of being "art house", or indeed of being a serious film, Hollywood or not. The centre of the film is an adulterous affair between a young married Englishwoman and a Hungarian, who meet in the North African desert just before the war on a Royal Geographical Society exploration and map-making expedition. The usual betrayals of love and friendship are compounded when later, in an attempt to rescue his lover who is stranded in the desert, the Hungarian betrays important information to the Germans, with terrible consequences. Later still, horribly burnt and pretending amnesia, he himself is rescued from the desert by the victorious Allied Army, and, nameless, is cared for in Tuscany as "the English patient". Dying, he confronts what he has done. This is all serious stuff, but somehow in this film it emerges as morally anodyne. The terrible choice the Hungarian had to make, between his friend's wife and his friend's country, is almost completely unexamined; it is passed over so swiftly as to be difficult to follow. Yet this is one of life's most interesting and painful choices - the conflict between one's own desires and other people's rights. The comparison with Casablanca is obvious - war-time North Africa, blinding passion; in the case of Casablanca, however, the lovers renounce each other, both for the sake of Ingrid Bergman's husband, and for the cause of peace for which he works. "I could not love thee, Dear, so much / Lov'd I not honour more", as Richard Lovelace wrote in the 17th century, and as Humphrey Bogart more or less says on the Casablanca airstrip. This is the "far far better thing" school of morality, and it has much greater moral force than the "this is bigger than both of us" view of romantic love. But the great emphasis of the 20th century on the personal has shifted the terms of this choice. E. M. Forster memorably and infuriatingly said that in such a dilemma he hoped that he'd have the guts to choose his friend; that is to put the personal before the public. Maybe since the time of Casablanca - made half a century ago - the notion of public morality and public duty have become not simply debased, but boring. How otherwise could a film on this subject, universally acclaimed as quite outstanding, have this strange moral hole in the middle? Movies aren't made for moral improvement, I admit. All the same films, especially enormously successful ones, do offer an opportunity of testing the moral temperature of the times; the reading from the film of The English Patient is that the sickly spirit of E. M. Forster seems to have triumphed.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, March 16, 1997
