`English Patient' hijacks innocent dreams

I HAVEN'T got a good record with predictions. I was stopped by a pollster in London, years and years ago, and shown the first copy of the English edition of Cosmopolitan. What did I think? I said confidently that it would never catch on.

I remarked to a fellow-guest, after a meeting early in her campaign where Mary Robinson outlined her high ideals for the Presidency, that only Mary Robinson could possibly believe that that sort of talk had the smallest chance of getting her elected in Ireland.

I said on Questions and Answers that a trail would never be established between the Ben Dunne £1 million and any particular individual.

But while that drama unfolds on one level of public life, let me cast a farewell look at another. I say without fear of contradiction that the film The English Patient will disappear without trace and that 10 years from now the people who hailed it as a great and beautiful movie will remember their enthusiasm, if they remember it at all, with embarrassment

What of it, you may say. Sure, it's only an oul' film. But films which appear to have an appeal beyond boundaries of place, to transcend educational and generational differences and somehow to establish an area of understood reference and shared taste between people as disparate as the workers in the Los Angeles film industry who gave it a load of Oscars, its obscure creators and audiences all over the world - these are not just any oul' films. These are major events in popular culture, the popular culture of the planet.

It is well worth pausing to speculate on their success, especially when the success in question seems, to a committed populist and romantic like myself, to be a load of cold-hearted tosh, even though I was primed for a weepie. I value romantic fictions. I think they're one of the few consoling things which the populace of this hard world have to warm themselves. I don't know that there's a culture on the face of the earth that is quite untouched by the idea of romantic love.

EVERYWHERE, young men and women take the choosing of each other with the most intense seriousness, and their elders don't really denigrate the preoccupation with romance, even though they may smile. They know how important a purpose it has.

There's a love industry, of course, but the love impulse isn't just the result of manipulation. There is God and money and health but many, many people - above subsistence level, anyway, would say that love has been the most important thing in their lives. Hollywood, certainly, has always taken it that love is what the mass audience cares about.

There is a pantheon of great romantic films, to which we are now invited to add The English Patient. But while the classic love stories have clean lines, The English Patient is a mess. It has no moral, no message. However many times Gone With the Wind comes back, it still has not just power and charm but one simple, plausible teaching. Selfishness will kill love.

But in The English Patient there's no particular reason why anyone does or does not do anything. It is all just invention. It doesn't convince, whereas the message of nobility and self-sacrifice that illuminates Casablanca has probably been more influential than half the religious teachers in the world.

The great romantic movies treat you as an equal. Sometimes even, you can see what they cannot. You can see that Vivien Leigh has really fallen in love in the end with Clark Gable. You can see that Rick is not the hard-hearted cynic he makes himself out to be. But The English Patient doesn't share: it patronises the spectator instead with a somewhat tatty glamour.

Its appeal is not based on what are agreed to be human truths on which all human beings are equally expert, it is based on shreds and tatters of post-colonial awe (the author, as a Sri Lankan living in Canada, has hardly escaped the damage colonies do) for a style that is alleged to be the property of the English upper classes.

A matter of accent and cheek-bones and flowing scarves, of a leather-bound classic as your only reading, of committing suicide when your friend turns out to be dishonorable.

The erotic frisson between Katherine (was Ondaatje deliberately invoking Graham Greene's aristocratic lover?) is predicated on their upper classness. The lower classes continually leave dances and have a quickie in a corner - they do it in town halls all over Ireland all the time - but if it is an Englishwoman with deep eyelids and jodhpurs and a Hungarian count - a Hungarian ticket tout or failed long-distance swimmer wouldn't do half as well - suddenly we're talking grand passion.

COULD anything better illustrate the persistence of the Brideshead Revisited syndrome and the propensity of sturdy republicans like ourselves and our American friends to fall for it, than the success of the film of The English Patient?

Even when the star-crossed lovers are on the one hand an actress with all the expressive charm of a stick-insect and on the other, an actor with small, ferret-shaped eyes who manages to look bald-even though he is not?

The basic implausibility of the scenario isn't a problem. Great fictional romances are never realistic. For one thing, they always end unhappily, whereas in real life they can well segue into settled happiness.

You don't have to believe in South Pacific to be moved by Some Enchanted Evening or in West Side Story to cry at the reprise of Maria. You don't have to check the events of Le Diable Au Corps or Madame X or Love Story or Waterloo Bridge for statistical probability, but there's such a thing as treating the audience with a carelessness that amounts to contempt.

Could you spend a night in a jeep buried in sand with another person without the smallest embarrassment, acquiring only the merest hint of sand on your elegant forehead? Would you expect a 78 r.p.m. record in the early 1940s to last a lovemaking session, however tightly wound the gramophone and however frenzied the session?

Would you expect the desert to be tidy? Not a fly to hand, not a pebble out of place? Would you expect your average corpse to be as perfectly preserved as the body of St Rose of Lima? Could you live for some considerable time in an abandoned monastery with two morphine addicts and no food and look marvellous on it?

It doesn't matter when adventure films or horror films or comic films aren't very good, but when love stories aren't very good - and everyone says that they are and gives them Oscars - something of real value is being traduced. The ordinary magic that people know - their ordinary precious expertise about love - is being devalued. Not by bread alone do people live. When the innocent dreams of millions are hijacked by cynics, the quality of life takes a further downward plunge.