Admittedly, this is a minor quibble but never does the Count's character get referred to as 'The English Patient' in the film, yet it is the title and the back of the DVD claims as such. It struck me as odd.
shareBecause that's the title of the book by Michael Ondaatje that the movie is adapted from.
shareIt's towards the end. He says that after his accident he was admitted to a hospital run by Italians, and that since they couldn't identify him they called him simply "English patient" on their medical documents.
shareand that is ironic isn't it, as he was Hungarian. Hard to tell without his input though.
shareWhat I love about this movie is that you could almost say the whole theme of it is the irony of being taken for something you're not, and the consequences of that. Almasy was assumed to be "English" by the medical staff, yet ultimately assumed to be enemy-German by the Brits who detained him -- a mistake that led to Katharine's death incidentally.
Even the piece of music, the chanted piece, sounds middle eastern (as Katherine asks: "Arabic?") - yet was a Hungarian song. This story is full of how everything and everyone can be not what they seem.
was that song really a hungarian song? It sounded quite arabic and almasy was in fact telling a fabricated story around the song to kathrin for fun... i actually didnt quite get that part, my mind was kinda somewhere else... but could it be, that the part about that song being hungarian was a "joke" as well?
This is not definitive, but the closed captioning has "singing in Hungarian" both times the song is played.
I understand. Thank you for telling me. -The masked bandit
Not spoken but if you remember the interrogation of him at a beach, the interrogating officer writes the word 'English' with a question mark at the end, in his small book and naturally he was their patient so an English patient. But, yes it reminds me of an other movie named 'Perfect Murder' in which no murder takes place at all!
shareApparently it was mostly because the title of the novel had to be kept. Because I agree with you, in the movie this anonymity is somewhat lacking.
In the novel it makes much more sense, because the fact that the patient is Almasy is not directly revealed for quite some time. And even when it is (and it's more like Caravaggio’s suspicion), the fact doesn’t matter much to anyone else. So throughout the novel he’s referred to as „the English patient” or „the Englishman”. He’s anonymous.
To be honest, that was part of the story’s charm. To me at least. He was just a man with a story – no name, no identity, only his memories. Like so many people during the war.
I’m not comparing the film and the novel, because in many ways it is a completely different story. Not better or worse, just different.
Though, if you loved the film, I would advise reading the novel. Gives another layer, multiple layers actually, to the whole story.