Ralph Fiennes wears an unidentified watch

In this still from The English Patient, Count László de Almásy walks a narrow stone lane beside Katharine Clifton, his collar open and his shirtsleeves rolled past the elbow. Ralph Fiennes plays Almásy, a Hungarian cartographer mapping the Libyan desert in the late 1930s, and Kristin Scott Thomas plays Katharine, the married Englishwoman he will fall for. She turns to him and smiles. He looks away.

His wrists give nothing up. The right hand is buried in a trouser pocket, the left hangs at his side in shadow, and the bare forearms show no watch, so there is nothing to identify in this frame.

Anthony Minghella adapted the 1996 film from Michael Ondaatje's novel and told most of it backward. The first Almásy the audience meets is a body burned past recognition, the unnamed English patient of the title, dying under morphine in a ruined Italian monastery while a nurse reads to him and the war runs down outside. The desert and this woman are what he is remembering. The film won nine Academy Awards, Best Picture among them, and its hero carries a real name: László Almásy, the explorer who mapped the Gilf Kebir plateau in the 1930s.