The English Patient (1996)

Release date: 1996-12-06
Country: USA|UK
Language: English|German|Italian|Arabic
Director: Anthony Minghella
Production Co: Miramax, Tiger Moth Productions
Genre: Drama, Romance, War
Rating: 7.4/10
Length: 2h 42min

Storyline

October 1944 in war torn Italy. Hana, 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, 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 in tact 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 cartographer in North Africa, which ...

Plot Keywords

patient, female frontal nudity, bathtub, shared bath, year 1944, year 1942, undressing, underwear, 1930s, canadian, sikh, nurse, flashback, english, church, dying, german, death, sexual tension, burnt face

Short Review

If Minghella's debut feature Truly, Madly, Deeply was overrated -- a Ghost for the NW3 set -- this movie is a quantum leap towards cinema's potential for magic.