The English Patient (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The English patient |
| Original title | The English Patient |
| Country of production | USA , UK |
| original language | English , German , Arabic |
| Publishing year | 1996 |
| length | 160 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Anthony Minghella |
| script | Anthony Minghella |
| production | Saul Zaentz |
| music | Gabriel Yared |
| camera | John Seale |
| cut | Walter Murch |
| occupation | |
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The English Patient is a feature film by British director Anthony Minghella from 1996. The love drama is based on the novel of the same name by Canadian author Michael Ondaatje . The film won nine Academy Awards at the 1997 Academy Awards , including Best Picture and Best Director .
action
Italy in the last days of the Second World War : the Canadian hospital nurse Hana believes that she has a curse on her because everyone who is close to her dies within a very short time. Her fiancé, captain of the 3rd Canadian Fusiliers , is fatally wounded on the battlefield. When her comrade and friend Jan dies in a mine a short time later , she leaves the convoy under the pretext of taking care of a patient who cannot be transported. The English patient , as he is called, is disfigured by severe burns and has lost his memory. Hana settles down with him in an abandoned mountain monastery . Caravaggio, a spy who happened to find out about Hana and her patient, and the Indian lieutenant Kip Singh, who defuses bombs and mines in the area in the service of the British army, will soon be there . Relieved of pain by injections of morphine , the patient gradually regains his memory with the help of a Herodotus book that he has provided with personal notes, photos and drawings .
The stranger is not English, but the Hungarian Count László Almásy . Before the Second World War he worked for the Royal Geographical Society in Egypt . Together with his friend Madox he led an expedition and discovered near Gilf el-Kebir , the Cave of the Swimmers , a location in the desert rock art cave drawings of people who seem to swim. The joy of the sensational find is clouded by the arrival of two new expedition participants. The English couple Katharine and Geoffrey Clifton have been summoned to Egypt by the Royal Geographical Society to support the expedition. However, it later emerges that Geoffrey Clifton had received the secret assignment to explore the territory of western Egypt for the British military as a trained pilot and photographer. The loner Almásy is immediately fascinated by the beautiful Katharine, but initially meets her with deliberate aloofness and tries to prevent her from being the only woman in the expedition camp while her husband Geoffrey sets off for Cairo to allegedly take portraits of a British diplomat and his family. While the expedition is surprised by a sandstorm, Katharine and Almásy slowly get closer. When the expedition returns to Cairo, they both begin a passionate love affair. However, Geoffrey learns of his wife's affair when he tries to surprise her on their first wedding anniversary. In front of the hotel he witnesses Katharine getting into a taxi and not returning until the next morning.
Katharine suspects that her husband suspects that she is on the wrong side of things and therefore decides to end the affair with Almásy. However, he does not get over her decision and gets drunk at the banquet to celebrate the successful outcome of the expedition. At the beginning of the war, the cartographers break camp in the desert and Almásy is then to be flown back to Cairo by Geoffrey. A tragedy breaks out when Clifton approaches the waiting Almásy with his plane and tries to kill him. However, he manages to avoid the approaching machine. It hits the desert floor and is completely destroyed. When Almásy finds Geoffrey lifeless in the cockpit, he notices that Katharine Clifton is in the front seat of the biplane . Seriously injured, Almásy carries her to the swimmers' cave , where she is supposed to hold out while her lover tries to get help. After three days of walking through the desert, he meets British soldiers in a town. Exhausted, he asks her to organize a rescue operation for "his wife". The British, however, suspect him to be a spy, demand his papers and make no move to comply with his urgent requests to save Katharine. Almásy loses patience and attacks one of the soldiers, whereupon he is knocked down and collapses unconscious. When he comes to, he is in a jeep on the way to a train station. He is mistaken for a German and is supposed to be taken as a prisoner of war by train to the north of Egypt. On the way he kills one of the guards and is able to escape. With the help of the Germans, he gets to the former plane of the expedition in exchange for maps from the Royal Geographical Society. He flies back to the cave, but too late: Katharine is already dead. He puts the dead woman in the cockpit and wants to fly with her to Cairo, but is shot down by German soldiers in his English plane. Count László Almásy survived the crash, seriously injured and completely disfigured by burns. Nomads find and care for him and later hand him over to the military hospital.
While Almásy is devotedly cared for and gradually tells his sensitive nurse all the details of his story, Hana regains his courage. She falls in love with the charismatic Kip. At the same time, Caravaggio reveals that he is looking for Almásy because he thinks he is a German spy. The Canadian had worked for the British secret service in Egypt . When the Germans conquered Tobruk using secret British maps, Caravaggio was taken prisoner of war. The German Major Müller ordered his thumbs to be amputated after the alleged spy had not disclosed any of his knowledge after weeks of imprisonment and torture (Caravaggio later retaliated by tracking down and killing Major Müller). Caravaggio is researching several years after the traitor, who paved the way for the Germans to Tobruk with maps, and believes he has finally struck gold at Count László Almásy's sick bed. He confronts him with the suicide of Almásy's friend Madox (who shot himself when the suspicion arose that Almásy was a spy for the Germans) and the death of the Clifton couple. Almásy then introduces Caravaggio into the real context. Although Almásy had given the Germans the tickets in exchange for the plane, he was never a spy. Mellowed by the tragic love story, Caravaggio forgives the count.
Kip, who almost died in a dangerous bomb disposal, is thrown completely off the rails by the death of his subordinate and friend Sergeant Hardy, who tried to hoist a flag on a memorial at the local victory ceremony and is killed by a hidden mine in the process. Kip's unit moves on shortly thereafter. Hana says goodbye to him with a heavy heart because she feels obliged to take care of her patient. On the same day, Almásy gives Hana the usual injections of painkillers to understand that she should help him die. In tears, she gives her beloved patient a lethal dose of morphine and reads him the last lines of his lover, which she had written shortly before her death, as requested. Then she sees that his suffering is over. After Almásy's death, Hana and Caravaggio leave the lonely monastery and travel to Florence to rejoin her hospital convoy.
History of origin
The film was based on the novel of the same name by the Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, who was loosely based on the biography of the Hungarian Count Ladislaus Almásy . The novel was published in 1992 and won the Booker Prize .
Saul Zaentz secured the film rights to Michael Ondaatje's novel. Filming began in 1996 with funding from the 20th Century Fox film studio . However, there were differences of opinion between the film studio and the producers about the cast. Above all, the Twentieth Century Fox insisted on casting a better-known actress for the female lead than the already engaged British Kristin Scott Thomas. The American actress Demi Moore was particularly interested in the part of Katharine Clifton. They tried to talk the producers out of engaging Willem Dafoe for the role of Caravaggio. The film studio suggested three other actors for the part: John Goodman , Danny DeVito, and Richard Dreyfuss .
After the producers insisted on their cast actors, the film studio Twentieth Century Fox dropped out as financier. Pre-production in Italy was suspended for three weeks before the Miramax film studio stepped in as financier with US $ 27.5 million . The new donors gave producer Saul Zaentz, who contributed 6 million US dollars to the film, and director Anthony Minghella largely free hand in filming the complex subject.
The film differs significantly from the novel in many ways, e.g. B. Almasy and Katharine Clifton are portrayed in the film as being of almost the same age (Kristin Scott Thomas is even 1½ years older than Ralph Fiennes), while Ondaatje has characterized Almasy as an aging man with thin hair and long eyebrows who already needs a hearing aid, and who Cliftons as young people just graduating from university. The age difference and Almasy's educational superiority are continually thematized in the novel. In addition, the real Almásy was homosexual, so the affair with Clifton is not historically correct.
The portrayal of the acts of war in North Africa is historically imprecise. The capture of Tobruk by German paratroopers is shown, who only arrived in Africa months later and were only ever deployed as ground troops. The Marder-type tank destroyers shown did not exist either. Furthermore, in the film, the Germans carry out raids and searches after the conquest, in which the inhabitants are treated like enemies. In fact, Tobruk was in the Italian colony of Libya, all of the inhabitants were Italians or Arabs with Italian citizenship, i.e. allies of the Germans. For the same reason there could not be an SD officer in Libya like the alleged "Major" (meaning SS-Sturmbannführer) Müller, since German police forces only operated in occupied countries, but never in allied countries. In addition, Müller wears the collar tabs of an SS standard leader, not a Sturmbannführer, which are also attached upside down.
The shooting for the film took place mainly in the Cinecittà film studios in Rome . The exterior shots were made a. in the towns of Pienza , Ripafratta and Sant'Anna in Camprena in Tuscany , as well as in Trieste and Venice . Contrary to the location of the film, the desert shots were shot in Tunisia . It took five to six hours for Ralph Fiennes' make-up to be applied to the burned Hungarian Count.
The scene in which Lt. Kip Singh the frescoes by Piero della Francesca are shown, was not shot in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo , but also in the studios of Cinecittà. In the novel, Hana does not even appear in the church scene; Kip visits the frescoes there with an old art historian.
The title song, the Hungarian folk song "Szerelem, szerelem", was sung by Márta Sebestyén .
synchronization
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reception
Anthony Minghella's film premiered on November 6, 1996 in Los Angeles . At an estimated $ 27 million production cost, the film grossed over $ 78 million at the box office in the US alone and was considered a financial success.
In his book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film , which was made during the shooting, Michael Ondaatje describes how the various components of the process of creating a film interact. The author placed a special focus on the work of the film editor Walter Murch , who worked on the film material for The English Patient for almost a year .
Reviews
"Director and screenwriter Anthony Minghella (' How crazy & from the bottom of my heart ') constructed a multidimensional mosaic that captivates with a dense atmosphere full of poetic and erotic suggestion."
"'The English Patient' is the stroke of luck in a literary film adaptation [...] Since ' Casablanca ', it is believed to be remembered, such a disturbing love story has not been seen."
“Following the example of a great literary model, the film combines the themes of love, war and death in an artfully poetic interweaving of the present and the past to create an epic that is more emotionally than external actions, whose style is reminiscent of David Lean's films. Despite some dramaturgical weaknesses an astonishing cinematic achievement in the environment of exclusively commercial-oriented productions. "
The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating particularly valuable.
Awards
The English patient won numerous festival and critic awards. In 1997 the film was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won nine of them, including the trophies for best film of the year and best director. The French Juliette Binoche was awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the self-sacrificing hospital nurse Hana, as one of the few foreign actresses in the history of the Academy Awards. Also honored were the Australian cameraman John Seale for the excellent photography of the film and the film music by the Lebanese composer Gabriel Yared, who was also awarded a Grammy a year later .
The film was also awarded the British Academy Film Award as best film of the year and the Golden Globe Award for best film drama . Supporting actress Juliette Binoche was awarded the Actor Prize at the Berlinale and the European Film Prize in addition to her Oscar win . The British Film Institute voted The English Patient # 55 in 1999 among the best British films of the 20th century .
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literature
- Michael Ondaatje: The English patient. SZ Library Volume 23 . Süddeutsche Zeitung / Library, 2004, ISBN 3-937793-22-4 .
- Anthony Minghella, Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient. A screenplay . Methuen Publishing, 1997, ISBN 0-413-71500-0 .
- Michael Ondaatje: The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film . Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, ISBN 0-375-70982-7 .
Web links
- The English Patient in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The English Patient atRotten Tomatoes(English)
- The English patient in the German dubbing file
- The English patient in the dictionary of international films
- [1] Detailed treatise on the mysterious death of Dorothy Clayton (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. Williams, Jeannie: 'English Patient' beats early odds . In: USA Today , November 14, 1996, p. 2D.
- ↑ cf. Meils, Cathy: US shores shallow for foreign-lingo pix . In: Daily Variety , July 14, 1998, Nes (accessed August 30, 2009 via LexisNexis Wirtschaft).
- ↑ cf. Ansen, David; Chang, Yahlin: Mapping the Heart . In: Newsweek , November 11, 1996, p. 72.
- ^ Matthias Schulz: Desert researcher Almásy. Nazi spy, lover, devil guy. Spiegel Online Einestages.
- ↑ cf. Filming locations in the Internet Movie Database (accessed August 30, 2009).
- ↑ cf. Millar, John: Don't mention the F-Word to Fiennes . In: Daily Record, March 4, 1997, pp. 22-27.
- ↑ Focus: Film
- ^ FAZ , Feuilleton, November 1996.
- ↑ The English patient. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .