After all the showers of awards, the theatrical re-releases, and the reams of praise written on the film, there are many for whom The English Patient remains a profoundly alienating experience. To admit as much opens you up to charges of Aesthetic Incorrectness - this was, by all accounts, the film of the 1996-97 season. I've yet to come across a single review that doesn't immediately beatify the film as the cinematic arts' last great hope, as the last sign of life of a dying art form, as a herald of the medium's newfound maturity as it enters its second century. Indeed, the film has had such significance placed on it that it's no longer just a film, it's a litmus test of the contemporary cinephile. The English Patient has its undeniable moments of artistic accomplishment, but nothing warrants a film's elevation to the status of Sacred Cinematic Cow. To suggest a film is critic-proof renders it beyond discussion, and hence useless.

It's an insidious form of critical fascism that stigmatizes whoever wasn't transported by the film, a snobbery that robs the viewer of their aesthetic autonomy. We've all been subjected to art history instructors who demand our respect for the established canon of visual art, instantly sabotaging an honest response when we first encounter it. This critical irresponsibility more than anything accelerates a medium's transformation into an irrelevant, desiccated museum piece. In essence, it takes away the enjoyment in art: what fun is it when you have to like something? Even in the world of film, to say "it's a classic" automatically predisposes a first-time viewer of say, Rashomon, Les Regles de Jeu, or certainly Citizen Kane, to watch it as if they were in a classroom - no fun at all. It was with this burden of expectation that I went to see The English Patient, praying I'd be enraptured as the rest of the world seemingly was by what I'd heard to be a visually stunning, highbrow, tragic love story packed with overwhelming sentiment. And, of course, I hated it.

Why couldn't anybody have told it like it is? The film is no love story - it's more like an anti-love story, in which no couple lives happily ever after, rife with anti-climax, where neither side of World War II is absolutely sympathetic, with vague anti-heroes and heroines, displaying not a single narrative element or moral certainty which might endear it to the usual consumer of Hollywood love stories - which makes its wholehearted embrace at the Academy Awards® all the more puzzling. This is not a fun movie, by any means; it leaves you awash in your own impressions with scarcely a narrative foothold - and it is for these reasons that it is a great film. In my case, it took a second, more objective viewing, in complete disregard of all I'd read, to finally see The English Patient on its own terms - as a film unlike anything we've seen before.

The English Patient, from the opening scene, is about throwing off our expectations, as a paintbrush strokes across an indeterminate surface to eventually create - what is it? Oh yes, a human figure - but what a journey to get there. So goes the film - a series of incomplete brushstrokes that only after a couple hours start to take recognizable form, start to make connections that cohere into a meaningful story. And what sort of story? We're given a preview, in the form of Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas)'s retelling of a tale of adultery from Herodotus - one that lacks a climax, and after which her audience pauses before realizing it's time to applaud. The same nonplussed reaction would follow a summary of The English Patient's plot: "As World War II closes, a Canadian nurse tends to a burned Hungarian count who mentally recalls his doomed affair with a married British woman." Yeah, and then what? Obviously there is more to the film than the story itself - it's the telling of the tale that matters. This is a film simply to be experienced, not one whose narrative cleverness you're to admire, like Scream or The Usual Suspects. This is one of those rare English-language productions that allow the viewer to make their own conclusions, versus the emotional cue-cards of previous Best-Picture Oscar® awardees Schindler's List or Braveheart.

The notion that love=loss is nothing new in motion pictures, but The English Patient for the most part skips the love and goes straight for the loss. The most obvious example is the nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) who, despite being in a healing profession, watches everyone she cares for (professionally or otherwise) die prematurely. "I must be a curse," she laments, "I'm in love with ghosts." This is what draws her to care for the Count Lazslo de Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), whose loves are also all deceased. As Hana risks walking through a minefield to collect mementos of blown-up friends, de Almasy's keepsakes (inserted among the pages of Herodotus) send his memories unreeling for us to watch. And we repeatedly witness instances of love doing little more than inciting trouble, pain, or violence: one of de Almasy's cartographer colleagues carelessly flirting with an Arab boy assistant and sending their car rolling down a cliff of sand; his own brutal first encounter with Clifton, in which she slaps him repeatedly as he tears through her dress; Clifton confessing that their consummation is both the happiest and unhappiest moment of her life. Love in The English Patient destroys, kills, leaves nothing in its wake: "New loves smash everything," Hana reads in de Almasy's diary, "for the heart is an organ of fire." Hana herself falls for, of all things, a defuser of land mines and bombs, so you wait for the inevitable detonation of that relationship; while in the film's end, as she accepts her patient's pleas to sedate him into oblivion, she learns that her own love must sometimes necessarily kill.

The English Patient fundamentally violates all the rules of the Hollywood love story, especially that which states that being in love means being together. One of de Almasy and Hana's final exchanges goes as follows: "I'm still here." "You'd better be." "Don't depend on it." Here, love means immediate sacrifice, giving the other up - there's almost no chance for de Almasy and Clifton to enjoy the standard "honeymoon period" before Clifton feels ambivalent about committing adultery - asking her husband when they might leave North Africa and return to England just minutes after ecstatic lovemaking with her Hungarian paramour. She breaks off the affair soon enough, the pain of that sacrifice punctuated by hitting her head on a metal pipe as she walks away. It isn't until her vengeful husband kills himself and maims her in an attempt to crash his plane on his rival that our protagonists cut to the chase and confess the depth of their feelings for each other, and as de Almasy leaves a dying Clifton in a cave while he goes for aid, you realize that another sacred Hollywood standard has been utterly smashed: the hero doesn't save the day. In this heartbreaking sequence you mourn not only the death of a beautiful woman, but the death of all your narrative expectations, and you are cast adrift in a sea devoid of guarantees - into life itself. Which is the last thing for which you expected to pay five-fifty.

The English Patient takes liberties with these and other tenets of standard cinematic storytelling, among which one of the most scandalous is its violation of the rule of sequential flashbacks: once you've returned to the present for a bit, the subsequent flashback must follow where the last one left off. These flash-half-backs (why couldn't the critics have warned us?) issue the death blow to any already-addled viewer's narrative comprehension. During my second viewing, however, such deviations from convention helped to liberate me from the constraints of expectation. We follow the same path as de Almasy himself, who evolves from a mapmaker who has to clearly delineate the concreteness of things to an individual unsure of what to believe anymore and sure only of what he feels. It is only then that de Almasy becomes likeable - hours into the film - after all of his friends and lovers have suffered or died as a result of his obsession with Clifton, in utter disregard of the consequences of his actions, including collaboration with the Nazis, all to save to the woman he loves. Love smashes all boundaries, whether of war, of marriage, of friendship - and yet guarantees nothing to those who serve it.

It is for none of these reasons that the Hollywood establishment fell over itself praising the film; they couldn't see it for its actual achievements, and instead wrote it off as "art." The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which Akira Kurosawa calls in his autobiography "the backbone of the American film industry") tried to validate itself, not the film, by awarding it the Best Picture Oscar®, to give the impression that it could still recognize art when it saw it. To call a film "Best Picture" for all the wrong reasons does The English Patient a disservice, and has succeeded only in labelling the the film as a highbrow event, not in enriching anyone's cinematic understanding. For myself, I respect the film - and I am able to say why - but I don't have to like it, and such an admission makes me one of the only honest critics around.