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Out of a book, a movie

Afsana Tazreen appreciates a soul-stirring story
ZZT believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces A or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently." ~Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient.
I saw The English Patient, when I was 16 years old. Needless to say, I did not comprehend much. Then I saw it again, last night 17 years later, and fell in love with De Almasy. De Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) is the main character in Ondaatje's prize-winning novel, The English Patient, a surreal scrapbook of romance and adventure and tragedy, jumbled out of sequence. Winner of nine Academy awards including Best Film of 1996, is a soul-stirring film that conveys the potencies of love, the haunting beauty of the desert shrouded in memory, betrayal and grief.
The plot is set during World War II and tells the story of a badly burned patient (Fiennes) who is taken to an Italian monastery at the end of World War II by Hana (Juliette Binoche), a Canadian nurse. Her spirit has been broken by the deaths of her lover and best friend, and she chooses to isolate herself from the world by moving into the monastery with her patient. It was there that the tale of the dying patient's life is slowly unraveled.
Through flashbacks, we learn that he is a Hungarian archaeologist on a map-making expedition in North Africa with his partner Maddox. His life turned upside down when an Englishwoman Katherine and her pilot husband Geoffrey Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth) join the expedition. Almasy is swept away with passion for the lovely and intelligent Katherine and we find ourselves pulled into the intimate moments of an obsessive love story - a story of two people who resist their feelings rather than embrace them which results in a love that is painful, complex and tragic. When two people love each other but cannot be together, it can turn into an obsession, a love that makes them happy and unhappy at the same time.
ALMASY
When were you most happy?
KATHERINE
Now.
ALMASY
And when were you least happy?
KATHERINE
Now.
The inevitable fallout from their stormy affair however destroys the lives of several people, including Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a Canadian spy and morphine addict. Another arrival on the scene is Kip (Naveen
Andrews), a Sikh bomb disposal expert who falls in love with Hana. The film is not just another love story but it is one of those rare movies that captivates its audience in a way that we can see the passion and feel the lust and comprehend why everyone is behaving so recklessly. Love is perhaps the strongest of human emotions. Not only is it unpredictable and uncontrollable but sometimes unbearable. We cannot decide whom we fall in love with, even if we are destined to suffer - like Almasy. "Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again," the anguished Almasy told Katherine.
Each story effortlessly illuminates the other and all these plot lines interweave and tauten right up to the climax. The triumph of the film lies not just in the powerful performances but in the writer-director Anthony Minghella's creation of an intimate epic that is complex-emotionally and morally-with scenes that stay with you for days. Fiennes's performance as Almasy was unrivaled; especially the scene where Katherine says, "I've always loved you" and Almasy breaks down crying was the one which touched me most. The close-up of his face reveals a surge of emotions which shows the intensity of his love for Katherine and inadvertently calls upon the audience to share his grief.
The stunning photography of the African desert fits aptly with the mood of sweeping romance: a bright yellow airplane against the clear blue sky, wrinkled dunes melting into the crumpled bedsheets. Fiennes and Thomas with their chiseled beauty are works of art themselves as is the luminousness of Binoche. The English Patient is not merely a love story but a badly burned portrait of remnants of the war. Films this good don't come along very often. It is not just entertainment but film-making that borders on genius.
Moments before his death, Almasy requests Hana to read Katharine's last note to him, the one she wrote to him while she was waiting for him in the cave.
"My darling, I'm waiting for you — how long is a day in the dark, or a week? The fire is gone now, and I'm horribly cold... We die, we die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have entered and swum up like rivers, fears we have hidden in, like this wretched cave. We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men. I know you will come and carry me out into the palace of winds. That's all I've wanted — to walk in such a place with you, with friends, on earth without maps."
AFSANA TAZREEN IS A LITERATURE ENTHUSIAST AND MOVIE BUFF.