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the_lady_lily) wrote2007-01-12 11:09 pm
the_lady_lily) wrote2007-01-12 11:09 pm
Entry tags:
Filmography
The English Patient
This film probably suffered a bit from me watching it half before going to the UK and half this evening. However, I did still enjoy it and can see why it did as well as it did at the time. Something about it didn't quite grab me and I can't quite articulate what it was, so it gets four stars - I'd not particularly want to watch it again, but am glad to have seen it.
The plot - a badly burnt man turns up out of the desert in Egypt, unable to remember anything that happened to him prior to his discovery in a wrecked plane. He ends up in France under the care of a Canadian nurse, who looks after him in a deserted monastry. A lovable rogue with severely damaged hands turns up who knows who the patient was in his previous life. The nurse engages in a romance with an Indian bomb disposal expert. Between this narrative, the patient flashbacks to the events that occured in Cairo before the war and led to the plane crash, namely an affair with a newly-married woman which led to her husband's attempt to kill himself and her (leading to both their deaths). All under the veil of archeology and the outbreak of the Second World War.
The love story is pretty darn tragic. Ralph Fiennes plays Count Laszlo de Almásy, the Hungarian of stiff upper lippedness who really rivals his British companions, and Kristin Scott Thomas is the terribly aristocratically beautiful Katharine Clifton, married to Colin Firth's slightly drippy Geoffrey Clifton. All torturous and a Hard Man falling in love and Stuff, a real weepy. Equally moving is the parallel love story of Juliette Binoche's Canadian nurse Hana (a cunning use of her French accent if ever there was one) and Naveen Andrews's bomb disposal man Kip. Hana brings Kip olive oil to wash his hair in. It's really rather adorable, as is the way he lights her path to him with oil in snailshells. Romanticness much.
The filming is beautiful too - all shots of the desert and lovely French countryside and beautiful buildings, that sort of thing. Plus wonderful buildings and shots through fretwork and windows over urban vistas in sunsets, that sort of thing. And caves with beautiful pictures. Yes. Lots of fairly sophisticated eye-candy.
But there were bits which kind of were difficult. The gratutious shots of the old acquaintance having the tendons in his hand severed, I freely fast-forwarded past - ugh. Just ugh. Also, the tension when Kip goes off to diffuse a bomb by an aqueduct is pretty overplayed, to the extent that I honestly feel that either the bomb going off or the bomb not going off would have caused the same emotional reaction (i.e. a 'that was so set up, bah').
Fours stars. Although better not to have three weeks in the middle of it, really.
This film probably suffered a bit from me watching it half before going to the UK and half this evening. However, I did still enjoy it and can see why it did as well as it did at the time. Something about it didn't quite grab me and I can't quite articulate what it was, so it gets four stars - I'd not particularly want to watch it again, but am glad to have seen it.
The plot - a badly burnt man turns up out of the desert in Egypt, unable to remember anything that happened to him prior to his discovery in a wrecked plane. He ends up in France under the care of a Canadian nurse, who looks after him in a deserted monastry. A lovable rogue with severely damaged hands turns up who knows who the patient was in his previous life. The nurse engages in a romance with an Indian bomb disposal expert. Between this narrative, the patient flashbacks to the events that occured in Cairo before the war and led to the plane crash, namely an affair with a newly-married woman which led to her husband's attempt to kill himself and her (leading to both their deaths). All under the veil of archeology and the outbreak of the Second World War.
The love story is pretty darn tragic. Ralph Fiennes plays Count Laszlo de Almásy, the Hungarian of stiff upper lippedness who really rivals his British companions, and Kristin Scott Thomas is the terribly aristocratically beautiful Katharine Clifton, married to Colin Firth's slightly drippy Geoffrey Clifton. All torturous and a Hard Man falling in love and Stuff, a real weepy. Equally moving is the parallel love story of Juliette Binoche's Canadian nurse Hana (a cunning use of her French accent if ever there was one) and Naveen Andrews's bomb disposal man Kip. Hana brings Kip olive oil to wash his hair in. It's really rather adorable, as is the way he lights her path to him with oil in snailshells. Romanticness much.
The filming is beautiful too - all shots of the desert and lovely French countryside and beautiful buildings, that sort of thing. Plus wonderful buildings and shots through fretwork and windows over urban vistas in sunsets, that sort of thing. And caves with beautiful pictures. Yes. Lots of fairly sophisticated eye-candy.
But there were bits which kind of were difficult. The gratutious shots of the old acquaintance having the tendons in his hand severed, I freely fast-forwarded past - ugh. Just ugh. Also, the tension when Kip goes off to diffuse a bomb by an aqueduct is pretty overplayed, to the extent that I honestly feel that either the bomb going off or the bomb not going off would have caused the same emotional reaction (i.e. a 'that was so set up, bah').
Fours stars. Although better not to have three weeks in the middle of it, really.
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