THERE is a great, failed love story in the heart of most people. The fact that the story is both great and failed at the same time is no coincidence - the love story is like an overbred animal, too perfect and - too fragile for life. You can either see this love story as having failed because it was not life worthy, or see life as unworthy of the love story. Most people see it both ways at the same time, keeping the ideal of the perfect romance alive in their hearts, while seeing its inherent weakness.
Art is at its greatest when it mirrors this complexity in human nature. Escapist romance confines itself to the great love story. Anthony Minghella's film, The English Patient, which cleaned out the Oscars cupboard last week, is an escapist romance. Tut tut tut, I can hear you say. If there are two things which don't go down well on the arts pages of "quality" newspapers, they are escapism and romance.
If that is the case, there is something wrong with "quality" newspapers, and with the readers whose views they represent. Some ghastly primness and appalling snobbery has entered our culture, leaving us with a few works of art and our bile for comfort,
People have not changed. They still need to escape into the doomed romance they have in their hearts. Why can we not go out and sink into a real romance any more.
There has always been a division between "high" and "low" culture, but in recent years this division has become much wider and better policed. This is causing damage at both ends of the spectrum, with the "low" getting lower and the high getting more arcane. But people's emotional needs do not change so quickly; perhaps they never change. So you're onto a surefire hit nowadays if you can deliver an escapist romance dressed up to, look like "high" art.
THAT is exactly what the film of The English Patient is. Minghella's script fits the template of "weepie romance" so well it could have been written from a manual. First, the romance between the attractive man and woman is made difficult, almost impossible. The woman has just got married and her husband adores her. They are forced to be together constantly on their desert expedition and in Cairo society, but they are being spied on by everyone in the group.
Death is the ultimate difficulty in a romance, of course, and so it is the trump card in a weepie, as every drunk who ever sang, "Oh Grace, just hold me in your arms/ And let this moment linger" in a pub knows. There is a brilliantly nightmarish quality about Count Almasy's desperate attempt to get back to Katharine Clifton in her desert cave, before she dies. It is a moment of stereotypical romance worthy of Dallas, however, when he" finally makes it to her dead body and carries her, in a billowing, white shroud, out of the cave. No matter how poorly handled the scene, those awful romantic templates are still buried deep in most people and make them cry - not for Katharine and Almasy, but for the death of perfect romance in their own lives.
What ruins the film is the attempt to package the weepie romance as "high" art. The message that love is better than war is drummed home through the symbolic linking of Katharine's body and the desert - the desert which can not be owned by its nomad inhabitants. The ownership claims of men on this body - Almasy's and her husband's - cause her death, as well as the ownership claims of men on the desert, which means Almasy is prevented from rescuing her in her cave. "This is not just a love story", is the subliminal message, "don't worry. You have a right to enjoy it."
A nice dose of intertextuality puts a quality polish on art - because faith in stories themselves has largely died in "high" art - and Helen Meany has discussed in this newspaper how the writings of Herodotus are used to do just that in the film and the novel. The Anna Karenina references backfire, however, in that they bring to mind another tale of doomed love, butt one which is complex and rooted in the society from which it comes, rather than on the run out of it.
This dressing up of popular culture as "high" art also occurs publishing. The Booker list has its fair share, year after year, of thumping yarns and romantic weepies, dressed up as "literary fiction". Ondaatje's novel doesn't even pretend to thump, however; Minghella has a better eye for a story, and he has lifted the yarn out of the novel with surgical skill. While Minghella's Patient runs with the romance, Ondaatje's Patient explores the sense of loss which accompanies love for most people; a sense which the war time setting greatly intensifies. It is surprising that Minghella's Patient, for all its anti war message, can't deviate from the romantic plot enough to grapple with that great loss provider, the atomic bomb, which in the book explodes the little family which has formed around the English patient.
The film has been hailed in the British "quality" press as signalling a victory for the independent film maker over Hollywood, for the small time British actor over the Hollywood star, and hopes are being expressed that its Oscars triumph will lead to more "quality" films. We don't need more of this kind of "quality". What we need is a return to unashamedly popular adventure and romance; then the quality would look after itself.
