April Showers: “The English Patient”

 Andrew here with an April Shower to pass the evening.

I’ve always gravitated towards film scenes incorporating water. Often it does not transcend the aesthetic (water on screen just looks pretty), but even as downpours – natural or man-made –are often utilised as read-made ways of attuning the audience to moments of sadness, it’s great when filmmakers utilise it other ways. I say utilise with slight hesitation because in a film where Minghella seems to be telegraphing nodes and nodes of information, the rain scene in The English Patient comes off as especially slight.

The titular patient (formerly known as Count Laszlo de Almásy) has been severely burned across the body and confined to a bed, remembering ghosts of his past. He is dying, and convivial Nurse Hana – running from ghosts of her own – is keeping him comfortable in his last days in an abandoned Italian monastery as World War II draws to a close. They are joined by mysterious thief Caravaggio and sapper Kip and his Sergeant Hardy. A few moments before the rain is released, an agitated Hana bicycles out to find Kip, her new lover. He is busy defusing a bomb which has his name written on it. Literally.

 

 [more] He succeeds as in the hubbub news of the war’s end is announced. The scene cuts immediately to a shot of the monastery as the thundrer claps outside.

"It’s raining."

Hana's laugh is so trippy. It’s the only moment of dialogue in the sequence. The burned patient unable to bathe has been surviving on sponge baths. “I’m dying for rain”, he quips to Hana in an earlier scene and here it is. Rain. How fortuitous. My ardent love forThe English Patient aside this scene has always left me pondering. Why rain? And why now, Anthony? The attribution of the shower of rain as a necessity in washing off the horror of the war is an obvious consideration. Like any good shower, the scene could function as a washing away of previous ills and one of the key symbol of Ondaatje’s text retained for the film is the idyllic nature of that abandoned monastery. Separated from the world Canadian, Hungarian, Indian and British are one frolicking in the rain like children. What is more idyllic than an image like that?

The fact that scene is preceded by a bomb diffusion and succeeded by an actual bomb explosion where one of the rain participants dies only underscores the futility of thinking that war – or pain – ever ends. And, yet, as plausible an explanation for the shower as that is. I never am satisfied. Because, the image of rain may arrest me, and its placement between two moments of death and near-death may seem fitting but it is the smooth tone of Ella Fitzgerald crooning “Cheek to Cheek” over the scene which gives me pause.

"But it doesn't thrill me half as much as dancing cheek to cheek."

It's not so much that the song is incongruous with the scene, as much as it evoke a romantic nature this scene is lacking in - and Minghella is fond of his music, it's too easy to be a gaffe. And, then I think, The English  Patient is many things (it’s a wonder that it never topples under the weight) but it’s foremost a love story. After their first post coital moment Almásy asks Katherine Clifton what she loves. Water, she replies. In their last post coital moments, as her husband waits at home with dying flowers, the scene fades out to Fred Astaire’s sombrely crooning “Cheek to Cheek”. The symmetry is faint, but still intrigues. The reason everyone is out in the rain is for our Patient who is silent amidst the whoops and shouts of the rest of the party. The two takes on a single song is such a fine example of playing with perception and memory. The Patient's lot is one of being forced to relive his entire existence in his mind. He's not ready to give up on the ghosts of memory and the way this scene unfolds - completed in little over a minute - points to something which should not be ostensibly great. Like the willowy wisp of a memory the shower is slight and its cheeriness against the rest of the film makes it seem almost like a fantasy shower. Showers to cleanse are one thing, but as the rain falls and the music plays this shower seems to me one of memory.

Even when the movement seems slight, Minghella is hiding secrets in the frame. The English Patient is as grooved and full of contours like the Patient's burned face, retaining more detail tha first glances suggest.

Comments

[mark]

1 of my faves from the 90's.

[brookesboy]

One of the most evocative displays of rain is found in The Killing Fields. It mirrors both Nature's tears for humanity and a desperately desired cleansing that can never be accomplished.