Daily Dialogue — February 8, 2017

THE PATIENT: Thank you. Read to me, will you? Read me to sleep.
HANA (reading Katherin’s letter): My darling, I’m waiting for you. How long is a day in the dark? Or a week? The fire is gone now…
KATHARINE (VO): and I’m horribly cold. l really ought to drag myself outside but then there’d be the sun. I’m afraid l waste the light on the paintings and on writing these words. We die.
HANA: We die. We die rich with lovers and tribes. Tastes we have swallowed bodies we have entered and swum up like rivers.
KATHARINE: Fears we have hidden in like this wretched cave. I want all this marked on my body. We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men. I know you will come and carry me out into the palace of winds, the rumors of water. That’s all I’ve wanted — to walk in such a place with you, with friends, on earth without maps.
HANA: The lamp’s gone out and I’m writing in the darkness.

— The English Patient (1996), written by Anthony Minghella, based on a novel by Michael Ondaatje

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Deathbed. Today’s recommendation by Gisela Wehrl.

Trivia: Was the first digitally-edited film to win an Academy Award for Best Film Editing (Walter Murch). Murch began editing the film mechanically, but then switched to the Avid system after his son suffered a medical emergency so that he could work from his home while his son recovered. Murch writes about the experience in his book “In the Blink of an Eye (2nd Ed.). (added comment by Gisela: which is one of the greatest books about filmmaking)

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Gisela. “The whole movie is about at the English patient’s deathbed. Therefore it’s logical, that he hasn’t much more left to say. His request for assisted suicide is even without word, just by slip the glas tubes towards Hana.

What is left? His thank to Hana and his wish to read for him, as she has done so many times. He repeats the wish, but more like a fact. And he adds „to sleep“, what makes the repetition not boring, but ads his wish for peace and wants to Hana’s decision lighter with this euphemism.

The patient leaves the last words to his beloved Katharine, read by Hana. This letter includes the love, the passion, the political questions, the war and other themes, that makes the movie and the novel so intriguing.

In a version of the script, the death scene of the patient and the letter is interrupted by Almásy’s return to the cave (as found here).The decision to leave that out makes the scene much stronger, as Almásy emotionally died the moment he found out, that Katharine was dead. When Hana reads the last lines to the patient, Katharine is alive again, as Almásy is dead.