The English Patient Scene 1

Scene 1

• A woman sings in Hungarian as a brush paints calligraphy on a piece of parchment paper. (We don't know about you, but this is how we begin our day every morning.)
• As the singing ends, what looked like calligraphy actually might be a person?
• And the texture of the paper fades into a sweeping aerial shot of rolling sand dunes.
• A man flies above the dunes in a little propeller plane, with a woman in white sleeping (or is she sleeping) in the front seat.
• Down in the desert, soldiers with anti-aircraft guns pepper the plane with gunfire.
• That turns the plane into planefire, and the flames consume the pilot. Yikes. That isn't in the safety brochure in the seat back pocket.