The English Patient is about seduction. The narrative details a seduction that many in the audience may find unfamiliar: it is a slow seduction requiring flirtation rather than the modern-day equivalent of meeting, saying hello and jumping straight into bed. All this may also account for why a simplistic film like Titanic, which is the cinematic equivalent of that hello stranger/good morning lover version of modern day seduction, can make a billion dollars and won Oscars and The English Patient only won the Oscars. The English Patient is about seduction in the art of filmmaking.
What is seduction? It is the art of discovering more about person whom you know almost nothing about. Seduction—real seduction—is about slowly peeling back the layers of the unknown to reveal…well…everything that can be revealed. A successful seduction results in nudity. Everything has been stripped to hide nothing. The English Patient starts off covered in layers of mystery and takes its time stripping away its mysteries.
The mystery begins with the title. The central figure at the heart of the narrative—the man doing the seducing—is not English at all. The opening of the film is also seduction: a man in the backseat of a prop engine plane slowly flying over a desert below with a sleeping women in the front seat. Except, of course, she’s not really sleeping. The movie takes some time to reveal just the truth about this mystery and the identity of the man and women in the plane are only the beginning.
Some films don’t want to build a mystery; the filmmakers are so eager to strip their story naked that they don’t appreciate the art of the tease. Of course, it is unfair to those who made The English Patient to accuse them of merely teasing. The Sixth Sense is a tease: scenes that could never have taken place in real life without someone asking Bruce Willis why he's talking to himself presented with only half the facts to tease you into caring about a mystery that anyone paying the slight attention has solved fifteen minutes in. Anyone who knows nothing about The English Patient who can tell you how the story ends after fifteen minutes is not just the movie lover; they are a witch! The art of cinematic seduction is working at such a high level of integrity in The English Patient that it is impossible to answer all the unsolved of the first hour without being equipped with some sort of supernatural talent.
