Nostalgia, either for old-fashioned movie romance or for Michael Ondaatje's writing, has obscured the real tragedy of The English Patient: that it took an arresting, original story and created from it a film bound by the cinematic cliches of empire.
As with any film adaptation of a novel, particularly one so praised as Mr Ondaatje's, director Anthony Minghella's vision for The English Patient has been judged first by the standards of the book. Mr Minghella's fans say he fashioned a passionate film from a difficult, elliptical book, while Mr Ondaatje's purist readers fault the director for ignoring Hana and Kip to focus on the more glamorous Katharine and Almasy. Both camps, however, ignore a much more useful comparison. A look at the two other Oscar-winning films of empire, A Passage to India and Out of Africa, reveals The English Patient's deeper flaws as well as its intriguing possibilities.
The similarities begin with the heroine, a minor character in the book transformed into the movie's star. This choice is a screenwriter and director's prerogative, but Mr Minghella took from the novel only what was most easily recognisable the story of a privileged woman whose romantic life is upset by her experience of a strange land. Everything appealing about Katharine Clifton in the movie – her intelligence, her passion, her willingness to buck convention and immerse herself in the 'real' Egypt/India/Kenya (in these films, backdrop is secondary to the central romantic drama) – is cribbed from Karen Blixen and Adela Quested.
Each of these women chose for a husband a reliable man of her own circle. Love for them was less important than a comfortable faith in convention. In The English Patient, Katharine marries the solid, patriotic Geoffrey, her childhood friend, after a string of disappointing love affairs. The choice echoes in both Karen Blixen, who marries the agreeable brother of a lover who rejected her, and Adela Quested, who agrees to marry an Indian Civil Service officer despite her fears that he has become a supercilious saheb. More importantly, though, all three use their marriages to leave the confines of wealthy European society and taste a bit of the exotic.