The English Patient (film) - Plot

Plot

The film is set during World War II and depicts a critically burned man (Ralph Fiennes), at first known only as "the English patient," who is being looked after by Hana (Juliette Binoche), a French-Canadian nurse in an abandoned Italian monastery. The patient is reluctant to disclose any personal information but through a series of flashbacks, viewers are allowed into his past. It is slowly revealed that he is in fact a Hungarian cartographer, Count László de Almásy, who was making a map of the Sahara Desert, and whose affair with a married woman, Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), ultimately brought about his present situation. As the patient remembers more, David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a Canadian intelligence operative and former thief, arrives at the monastery. Caravaggio lost his thumbs while being interrogated by a German army officer, and he gradually reveals that it was the patient's actions that had brought about his torture. In addition to the patient's story, the film devotes time to Hana and her romance with Kip (Naveen Andrews), an Indian Sikh sapper in the British Army. Due to various events in her past, Hana believes that anyone who comes close to her is likely to die, and Kip's position as a bomb defuser makes their romance full of tension.

In the first phase, set in the late 1930s, the minor Hungarian noble Count Laszlo de Almásy (Fiennes) is co-leader of a Royal Geographical Society archeological and surveying expedition in Egypt and Libya. He and his English partner Madox are at heart academics with limited sophistication in the swirling politics of Europe and North Africa. Shortly after the film begins, both the morale and finances of their expedition are bolstered by a British couple, Geoffrey and Katherine Clifton (Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas) that joins the exploration party. The Count is taken with the gorgeous and refined Katherine. When Geoffrey is often away from the group on other matters, an affair takes wing. The final months before the war's onset bring an archeological triumph: the Count's discovery of an ancient Saharan cave decorated with "swimming figure" paintings dating from prehistoric times, the "Cave of Swimmers". This period also sees the romance between Katherine and the Count rise to a sensuous peak and then seemingly fade. Katherine is plagued with the guilt of infidelity, while the Count shows a streak of jealousy along with an imbalance that will later haunt him.

The fall of 1939 and the war bring all excavation at the cave to a halt, and Madox and the Count go their separate ways. Geoffrey Clifton meanwhile has pieced together the outline of the affair, and seeks a sudden and dramatic revenge: crashing his plane, with Katherine aboard, into the Count's desert camp. The wreck kills Geoffrey instantly, seriously injures Katherine, and narrowly misses the Count. He manages to take Katherine into the relative shelter of the swimming figure cave, leaves her with food, water, a flashlight, and a fire, then begins his scorching three day walk back to the nearest town and help. The town is held by the British Army, and the dazed and dehydrated Count, with his non-English name, is unable to coherently explain to officials the plane crash and Katherine's plight. Instead he loses his temper during questioning and is thrown into military jail. He is sent in chains on a train "north to Benghazi", escapes, finds himself behind Afrika Korps lines and quickly trades his desert maps with the Germans for petrol for Madox's biplane, a De Havilland Tiger Moth, which he had left behind at the close of their archaeological expedition. By the time he returns to the cave, Katherine is dead – and in all but a physical sense, so is the Count. He manages to bundle Katherine's body into the plane and takes off. Mistaking the Tiger Moth for an RAF reconnaissance aircraft, a German anti-aircraft battery shoots down the plane as Almásy pilots it over the desert. Horribly burned but alive, he is rescued by Bedouin tribesmen.

The film's second phase shifts to Italy and the last months of the war. The Count by now is an invalid patient, and wholly dependent by this time on morphine and the care of his French-Canadian nurse Hana, detached from her medical unit and established in a battered but beautiful Italian monastery. That place becomes the focal point for more plot threads, some new and some unfinished from the North African phase, all themed around love, chance, and the backdrop of the war. Hana has seen a fiancé and a nursing friend die in the Italian campaign, and is left to wonder if her involvement with a British-Indian lieutenant will break her cycle of love and grief or simply continue it. A visitor to the villa named Caravaggio is in search for the disfigured Count that he believes played a role in his own ill-starred time in Egypt and Libya. For Caravaggio unwittingly stumbled into the wreckage of the Count-Katherine-Geoffrey love triangle, c. 1940–1942. He's lost both thumbs in a grisly interrogation at the hands of the Nazis, and has since hunted down and killed those he believes responsible for his fate. He believes the Count was part of a web of desert spying and intrigue, and knows that he traded maps with the Germans. He confronts him with news of Madox's suicide, and posits that the Count killed the Cliftons. Only a full recounting at the villa of the Cliftons' crash and the Count's map dealings with the Germans to recover Katherine bring Caravaggio to understanding and forgiveness.

Hana, too, finds reconciliation at the film's end. Her lieutenant survives a brush with death on the war's last day and her hope in love is rekindled. The Count asks for, and dies of, an overdose of morphine from Hana.