Twelfth Night The English Patient

...a full-bodied visualization of the tempest that leaves Viola stranded...

...On stage, let Viola be played by the most buxom of actresses and we will still assent to Orsino taking the disguised, shipwrecked orphan for a boy and making her his page, to Olivia falling in love with her, to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew wanting to fight her...

...At first, the count is supposed to be an amnesiac, piecing his identity together through memory, but right from the start the flashbacks are so clear and conventionally filmed, so untouched by haziness or confusion, and, above all, so linear, that they can't possibly be the musings of a man trying to reassemble his past...

...By contrast, when Michael Powell shot the equally fantastic Tales of Hoffman entirely indoors on ultra-stylized sets with insistently artificial lighting and color, one could easily accept the willowy Pamela Brown as the male sidekick of the hero...

...In both cases, the hero performs his monoma-niacal function without exhibiting any of the gratuitous qualities that really memorable characters possess...

...The flash-backing, time-hopping structure proves to be a gimmick...

...Misidentified as an English patient by hasty army medics, his face ruined and his body roasted by the blaze in which his plane went down over North Africa after being strafed by the Germans, Almasy lies in coolness, lulled by morphine, listening to old dance-band records...

...Minghella sporadically makes good on the promise that his movie will be the last word in breathtakingly romantic cinema...

...A few hours after I saw it, I had trouble recalling its two lovers as people, as social beings, but I vividly remembered Kristin Scott Thomas smacking Ralph Fiennes full force in the face just before he fell at her feet and clutched her thighs...

...As World War II draws to a close in Europe, a Hungarian count named Almasy lies in a sort of single-patient hospice improvised out of a bombed-out Italian monastery by his compassionate nurse, Hana...

...Surviving a sandstorm, Katherine and Almasy dig out their desert guides, who have been buried alive in a car...

...But the movie keeps making other promises that it can't keep...

...Fantasies and fairy tales need the enclosure of playhouses or movie studios...

...But only a measure...

...A great deal of whatever enjoyment you can take from this movie depends on whether or not you like Ben Kings-ley's Feste...

...As for the present-tense scenes between Hana and the count, they're occasionally touching but lack dramatic momentousness...

...This is not a hey-non-ny-no jester capering to make lords and ladies titter, but a strange vagabond who finds perennial employment as a sort of guru to Olivia...

...as the lovers scrabble, they hear the desperate men below sounding the car's horn...

...And since we tend to remember movies in bits and pieces rather than as coherent narratives, the best bits in this film may win it a classic status...

...Somehow, I don't think this is what the Bard had in mind...

...Kip hoists Hana up in a pulley so that she can study the frescoes painted high up on the walls of a church...

...once he has her aloft, he manipulates the ropes so as to let her enjoy a kind of Peter Pan aerial dance...

...Reduced to little more than a vessel of memory, he relives his love affair with the married Katherine Clifton, a passion that is gradually revealed as the indirect cause of his present physical ruin...

...But since the count keeps his reminiscences locked up in his mind, and since Hana, as played by the beautiful and unflappable Juliette Binoche, seems quite capable of renewing her own life regardless of which patient is under her care, the two destinies never harmonize...

...Minghella has been making some noises in recent interviews about his real theme being the unreality of national identity in the face of the extemities brought on by war...

...Furthermore, Imogene Stubbs, superb as Emma Thompson's rival in Sense and Sensibility, entirely lacks the androgynous glamour Viola must possess, while Nigel Hawthorne, who blessed The Madness of King George with his talent, is much too old to suffer the indignities that befall Malvolio in the later stages of the play...

...Still, The English Patient does seem to be pleasing those crowds...

...In this movie, Illyria is a vaguely Near Eastern country, part nineteenth-century Greece, part Turkey, or even a touch Serbian...

...But what happens when you put the actors in nature and point a camera at their only moderately made-up faces...

...One feels that the inner strength of this shamanistic clown resides in his regarding himself as beyond all hope...

...I'm not asking for the character to deliver a midmovie resume of his past, but only for a sense of the past, no matter how fleeting...

...They come unstuck in the open air...

...It's not just carnality that's the lure but the feast of erotic ecstasy, the high of watching characters being swept away by love amid the alarums of war and the disintegration of nations...

...I did...

...Viola has been merely physically shipwrecked, but this Feste is being shipwrecked every second of his life in some dismal corner of his mind...

...As he reconstructs his past, Hana, depressed by the loss of friends and a lover in battle, renews her love of life by having a joyous affair with the gallant Sikh bomb-disarmer, Kip...

...Almasy and Katherine fren-zedly couple in a nook of the British embassy of Cairo while British soldiers, treated to a Christmas party out in the adjoining courtyard, sing all the familiar cold-weather carols in the sweltering Egyptian heat...

...In his recent film adaptation, Trevor Nunn settles on a solution that has worked for many stage productions of this and other Shakespeare comedies: a discombobulation of the viewer's sense of reality by stylishly mongrelizing the historical and geographical setting...

...He exists on screen solely to love and to suffer, just as a John Wayne cowboy exists solely to ride and to shoot...

...For instance, Almasy has qualms about embarking on an adulterous relationship because, apparently, he's an inveterate loner...

...If this gentle blurring of period and place cajoles us out of our habit of seeing a tale as occurring in one time, one place, why shouldn't we also be cajoled into accepting the flimsily fabricated masculinity of Viola's Caesario as the most impenetrable of disguises...

...As for Katherine, she's a quick-sketch of the sort of socialite we have come to know in countless British novels and countless episodes of "Masterpiece Theater...

...Worst of all, the characterizations of the count and his lover are thin and rootless...

...If Almasy had recounted the tale of his passion to the depressed nurse and thereby recharged her love of life (as Jessica Tandy recharges Kathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes), we would have understood why the story had to bring together these two souls...

...But where does that solitariness come from...

...To see this movie alongside La Grande Illusion, a work that deeply explores the same theme, is to understand the gulf between glossy, crowd-pleasing talent and implacable genius...

...Malvolio glimpsed by the camera in his celibate bedroom reading romantic trash (shades of Remains of the Day...

...Malvolio may deserve to be brought down for his arrogance, but his outburst at the conclusion lets us know that he is also a man of some innate dignity, and deserves a measure of compassion...

...The English Patient, Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's acclaimed novel (which I haven't read), is a passion-soaked film and romance-starved audiences are ready to swoon even before they see it...

...Shooting on location, no matter how stylish the production values, entails a certain inalienable naturalism which is at odds with the fairy-tale doings of Twelfth Night...

...But I wasn't cajoled...

...Now that's-pant, pant-that's entertainment!that's entertainment...

...Its army is uniformed like a Central European force in service to the Austro-Hun-garian Empire, but at Lady Olivia's manor, Toby Belch and his gull, Andrew Aguecheek, are figures out of Three Men in a Boat, while Malvolio and his staff would not have been out of place in the early episodes of "Upstairs, Downstairs...

...love as obsession, love as spiritual breakthrough...

...Well, neither can Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which thrives on the innate artificiality of theater: painted actors emoting before painted wood and canvas under hot lights, with the distance between the proscenium and even the first row aiding the suspension of disbelief...

...I couldn't even believe in Ralph Fiennes as a Hungarian, not because the actor eschewed a thick accent, but because, as written, the count doesn't seem to come from any country except the Land of Longing Gazes and Smoldering Sulks...

...The movie has some good performances and a number of well-executed moments: Olivia, so enflamed by her newborn passion for Viola/Caesario that she rushes out into the daylight, leaving the object of her desire to stand bemused in a darkened house of mourning...

...Love past, love present...

...Though the director juggles the periods and locales, each scene has its own reality since the actors are always photographed in real houses, riding real horses near real sea coasts bounded by real water...

...When Hawthorne, too frail even to ride a bicycle steadily (as one scene plainly shows), is imprisoned in a barn, spattered with mud, and humiliated in front of his staff, we may feel that not only Sir Toby and Feste but Shakespeare himself are sadists for treating this grandfatherly figure with such brutality...