Anthony Minghella's 1996 "The English Patient" portrays love (adulterous and platonic) while contrasting war with peace, disapproving of national boundaries, investigating the meaning of betrayal, and charming our eyes. It is one of my favorite movies and, as of April 2020, you can stream it from multiple sources as well as buy the DVD from the Criterion Collection.
The story alternates between Italy at the end of World War II and Egypt at the beginning. We follow an individual who is healthy and multilingual in Egypt but slowly dying and English speaking in Italy. Early in the film we see the ending of the Egyptian part of the story: a horribly burned stranger is found. Instead of letting him die, Arabs in a travelling caravan make a sustained effort to save his life. Transported somehow to Italy, the stranger's skin has grotesquely mended while his lungs are slowly failing.
The Arab humanitarianism to which the English patient owes his life introduces the movie's underlying theme: people will form bonds and help each other across national/cultural boundaries--provided their governments don't fire them up with fear and war. This theme seems naive when we think of our natural indifference to, and sometimes fear of, strangers. But the theme is important. Rather than ratcheting up our fear, governments ought to be downplaying it. Moreover we ourselves miss out on some good experiences when we stay within our cultural bubbles.
Much of the Egyptian part of the movie involves a group of amateur archaeologists and cartographers who call themselves "The International Sand Club". This name spells out two facts: club members spend a lot of time in the desert and they have many ethnicities. These ethnicities are demonstrated to us when club members amuse themselves by singing a verse of "Yes, We Have No Bananas" over and over in different languages.
The allied army in Italy thinks their patient is English and the English army in Egypt thinks the same man is German. He is actually a Hungarian, named Count Làzlò de Almàsy. Once the war starts, that name is a huge detriment because ignorant English soldiers consider it to be German.
So in Italy Almàsy drops his name and nationality by pretending amnesia. When an English officer tries to extract enough memories to determine his nationality, Almàsy answers in a way that makes it seem he is confused but English.
I doubt you will view this scene without thinking Almàsy really suffers from amnesia. In fact, without reading this review you may go through the entire movie thinking so. So I am telling you to pay close attention to conversations between Almàsy and his lover.
She is a married English woman and at one point she describes her house in England. At another she claims that Egypt has made her a "different wife". Almàsy half believes that means she has become his wife.
This is what Almàsy tells the officer: he describes his lover's house as if it belongs to his nonexistent wife. He doesn't assert that he is married and that he has lived in the house, merely that he seems to remember those things. The officer believes that this horribly burned man is remembering England and so a Hungarian count becomes an English patient.
After this patient's nationality is determined a Canadian nurse takes a special interest in him and arranges to stay behind when her field hospital moves on. She will remain with him until he dies. It is expected he will die anonymously but a spy with a huge grudge against one Count Almàsy shows up. The confrontation forced by that grudge is rather peaceful--after all Almàsy is unable to get out of bed. As the confrontation unfolds we see an explanation of how it is that Almàsy came to be flying a plane whose crash left him badly burned.
Part of that explanation involves a scene in which a crazed Almàsy, who has just walked solo through the desert for three days, argues with an English officer. That scene ends with Almàsy being knocked unconscious with a rifle butt. The screen becomes black and then a small light appears. This a cut to another scene in a large cave containing his injured lover. Minghalla provides many artful transitions between scenes, not all of them visual. Three more examples:
Waves of desert sand transform into waves of bed sheets.
Mine sweeping cuts to a truck convoy with the loud bang of a truck backfire.
A story of royal infidelity by Herodotus is told with several cuts between the Canadian nurse who reads it and the English lover who tells it from memory.
"The English Patient" never loses track of its theme. At one point the Canadian nurse happily meets someone from the same town as she. Almàsy, who believes national/cultural differences have nothing to do with friendship, says "why are people so happy when they collide with someone from the same place?". Later when the nurse is romanced by a Sikh bomb squad lieutenant, Almàsy approves. If the approval is reluctant, the reason is only because Almàsy and the nurse have bonded in a platonic relationship.
In the October 2017 Atlantic, family therapist Esther Perel wrote that marital infidelity is often caused, not by bad marriages, but by the need to be someone different. We might read that into what Almàsy's English lover meant when she said "In Egypt I am a different wife." In any case we are drawn into sympathy with the lovers. Their conversations go beyond the banal with such utterances as
"A woman should never learn to sew and if she can she shouldn't admit to it."
"New lovers are nervous and tender but smash everything."
Minghella however doesn't let us fall into believing infidelity causes no pain. In this story, the pain caused by Almàsy's affair is no small thing.
"The English Patient" is an adaptation from a book of the same name by Michael Ondaatje. This book ends as news of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima reaches Italy. Ondaatje, who was born in what was then Ceylon, has a character saying "they would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation." Menghalla, a Brit, leaves that jab at Anglo-Saxon racism out of the movie.
Both the book and the movie have won major awards and not just for the ways they put this story together. The beauty of the book's prose and the beauty of the film's visuals played no small role in the judges' appreciation.