Yuna@yuna_y

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The English Patient desert tent scene

The plane is the part nobody warns you about. It falls out of that desert sky and the whole movie has already told you why, and you still are not ready for it. What Anthony Minghella directed in 1996 is not a romance, even if that is the shelf everyone files it on. It runs 162 minutes, and somewhere inside those minutes a man who cannot remember his own name gets nursed by a woman who has no way of knowing whether he is a spy. Ralph Fiennes plays him, and the burns are not a makeup flex, they are the reason you cannot look away from his face. Juliette Binoche plays the nurse, and she is doing the quiet labor of holding three ruined lives together while the men around her get to be dramatic about theirs. War, sand, one affair, three lives that do not survive it intact. That is the actual architecture here. The score does something to your chest that I cannot explain without sounding unwell. The desert does the rest. Nine Academy Awards. Best Picture. Best Director. Best Supporting Actress. I do not bring that up as a flex, I bring it up because it is genuinely strange that a movie this patient and this sad got rewarded like that, and I think about it more than is reasonable. He can't remember his name. She nurses the stranger who might be a spy. Somewhere in the desert a love affair burned hotter than the plane that fell from the sky. #RalphFiennes

1h

Yuna@yuna_y

Follow

The English Patient desert tent scene

The plane is the part nobody warns you about. It falls out of that desert sky and the whole movie has already told you why, and you still are not ready for it. What Anthony Minghella directed in 1996 is not a romance, even if that is the shelf everyone files it on. It runs 162 minutes, and somewhere inside those minutes a man who cannot remember his own name gets nursed by a woman who has no way of knowing whether he is a spy. Ralph Fiennes plays him, and the burns are not a makeup flex, they are the reason you cannot look away from his face. Juliette Binoche plays the nurse, and she is doing the quiet labor of holding three ruined lives together while the men around her get to be dramatic about theirs. War, sand, one affair, three lives that do not survive it intact. That is the actual architecture here. The score does something to your chest that I cannot explain without sounding unwell. The desert does the rest. Nine Academy Awards. Best Picture. Best Director. Best Supporting Actress. I do not bring that up as a flex, I bring it up because it is genuinely strange that a movie this patient and this sad got rewarded like that, and I think about it more than is reasonable. He can't remember his name. She nurses the stranger who might be a spy. Somewhere in the desert a love affair burned hotter than the plane that fell from the sky. #RalphFiennes

1h