| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Ralph Fiennes | ... | Almásy | |
| Juliette Binoche | ... | Hana | |
| Willem Dafoe | ... | Caravaggio | |
| Kristin Scott Thomas | ... | Katharine Clifton | |
| Naveen Andrews | ... | Kip | |
| Colin Firth | ... | Geoffrey Clifton | |
| Julian Wadham | ... | Madox | |
| Jürgen Prochnow | ... | Major Muller | |
| Kevin Whately | ... | Hardy | |
| Clive Merrison | ... | Fenelon-Barnes | |
| Nino Castelnuovo | ... | D'Agostino | |
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Hichem Rostom | ... | Fouad |
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Peter Rühring | ... | Bermann |
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Geordie Johnson | ... | Oliver |
| Torri Higginson | ... | Mary | |
October 1944 in war torn Italy. Hana (Juliette Binoche), a French-Canadian nurse working in a mobile army medical unit, feels like everything she loves in life dies on her. Because of the difficulty traveling and the dangers, especially as the landscape is still heavily booby-trapped with mines, Hana volunteers to stay behind at a church to care solely for a dying semi-amnesiac patient, who is badly burned and disfigured. She agrees to catch up to the rest of the unit after he dies. All the patient remembers is that he is English, and that he is married. Their solitude is disrupted with the arrival at the church of fellow Canadian David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), part of the Intelligence Service, who is certain that he knows the patient as a man who cooperated with the Germans. Caravaggio believes that the patient's memory is largely intact, and that he is running away from his past, in part, or in its entirety. The patient does open up about his past, all surrounding his work as a ... Written by Huggo
as can be read in many reviews here it is a movie you love or hate - apparently not so much space for opinions in between. I for one think that is a good sign.
I always appreciated this movie, although the genre is not my typical style (I never watched Titanic for instance, and am not planning to).
The English Patient grips because it shows how people can be different when they are in an exotic environment as opposed when they are 'home' (Katherine), it shows how destructive love can be in a slow, strong and utterly painful way, it excites because of the extremely passionate affair, the pain of the one(s) who leave behind, how pointless one can feel to move on.
The photography is just stunning, not to mention the play of the actors. The pace is slow, but timely, and that does justice to the book, the timeline, and the depth/development of the characters. To put this in 110 minutes (as some seem to suggest here) would amputate the multi-layeredness of this movie. People tend to have difficulties with the pace of movies... as if they are in a rush to get to work.. hey - get a life ! ;-) enjoy...
I give this movie 4.5 out of 5.