The English Patient Plays Casablanca

Thu, 01 May 1997 00:00:00 -0400

If it does nothing else, the success of the film version of The English Patient (nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture) proves that the secret to postmodern film technique lies more in the way the story gets packaged than in the story itself. Hide a commonplace sentiment behind layers of montage, bricolage, multiple viewpoints, time shifts, and dazzling cinematography and music. Keep the plot ends loose for the first third of the film. Cut back and forth from a ruined villa in World War II Italy, in which a mysterious “English patient” with a burned face is recovering from being shot down over the North African desert, to his remembered past. Make it disjointed and strange, like a Hallmark card cut apart and reassembled into a Cubist construction. But the Hallmark card nonetheless remains, and The English Patient proves that sentimentalism can survive endless adaptation––even postmodern film techniques.

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The English Patient Plays Casablanca