The English Patient Family Review

At the close of World War II, a young nurse tends to a badly-burned plane crash victim. His past is shown in flashbacks, revealing an involvement in a fateful love affair.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 cartographer in North Africa, which was interrupted by the war. He may not be running from his work as a spy for the Germans as Caravaggio believes, but rather the memory of an affair he had with married Katharine Clifton (Dame Kristin Scott Thomas), the love of his life, and the memory of a promise not totally fulfilled. Hana may also test her theory of her fates with love and death as she embarks on a relationship of her own with Kip Singh (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh from India, whose unit has camped on the now overgrown lawn of the church. Their work entails sweeping for and defusing mines, the discovery of one such mine which had earlier saved her life.—HuggoThe sweeping expanses of the Sahara are the setting for a passionate love affair in this adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel. A badly burned man, Count Laszlo de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), is tended to by a nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), in an Italian monastery near the end of World War II. His past is revealed through flashbacks involving a married Englishwoman and his work mapping the African landscape. Hana learns to heal her own scars as she helps the dying man.—Jwelch5742In the 1930s, Count Almásy (Fiennes) is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics.Beginning in the 1930s, this movie tells the story of Count Laszlo de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), who is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert, along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics that is later revealed in a series of flashbacks while Almásy is on his death bed after being horribly burned in a plane crash.—Anthony Hughes <[email protected]>2 moreAll