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Title: The English Patient (1996)
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| 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 | |
 |
Hichem Rostom | ... | Fouad |
|
|
Peter Rühring | ... | Bermann |
|
|
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
Well, to begin with, I liked the movie. It's rather long, and I had to switch it off and resume watching later, but I couldn't wait to resume. There are people saying how boring and stupid it is. It's true, to some extent: it lacks movement and tension, but before saying whether it's boring or not one should determine what genre it is. See, there are deserts but it's not Indiana Jones, there are planes, soldiers, nurses, but it's not a war movie. It's a romantic story, a love story, and everything: location, characters, time - fits this romantic pattern. We see exotic desert landscapes, Cairo, caves, sandstorms (on the one hand), and an Italian villa stuffed with mines (on the other), set before/during/right after WWII, - this would be an extraordinary situation. Now, characters. Explorers, a nurse, a sapper, a thief, German soldiers, spies... And the main hero is a Hungarian count, out in Africa making maps, moreover, a member of the Royal Geographical Society. Here are our extraordinary characters.
The point is that all this wouldn't drag a motion picture higher than 5 out of 10. It's then just a clear-cut example, nothing out of the ordinary. What makes this film very good (at least) is the acting. The performances are brilliant on the part of Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas. Besides, it's very beautifully shot. It's enjoyable, just like any romantic story should be. Although there's nothing really clever, or sophisticated, or globally important about it, but I wouldn't call it stupid.
Oh, and there's another curious thing about the movie. The love itself isn't shown here like anything sudden, unusual, something that breaks down settled, happy lives of the characters. It just happens, and that's all. To me it even seemed that those lives were broken even before the events described.