An epic of life, death, love, sensuality and war.

Rating: 8/10 (20 March 2010)

The English Patient grabbed nine Oscars (including the Best Picture), along with three other nominations in 1997. Need I say more that this is a must watch. A word of caution this is not your regular movie; it is slow, steady, poetic and slightly on the classical side (if you get my drift).
The movie open with an aircraft shot down somewhere in Sahara Desert. The pilot, Count Laszlo Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), survives with some serious burns and very little recollection of the past, and is rescued by a Bedouin. Turned over to the Canadian medical unit stationed in Italy, with nothing to go on (due to serious burns and amnesia) he is named "English Patient".
Hana (Juliette Binoche), a nurse in the unit takes care of him. Realizing that "English Patient" is slowly dying, Hana manages to persuade here superior to care for him alone in an abandoned villa, until he succumbs to inevitable.
It is not too late they are accompanied by- a mysterious, crippled war veteran named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), who has a hidden agenda, and a pair of bomb experts, the British Sgt. Hardy (Kevin Whately) and his Sikh superior, Kip (Naveen Andrews).
The storyline swings to-and-fro between past and present, through dreams and waking flashbacks as Laszlo's memory slowly return. Constant flip-flops between late-'30s and early- '40s, reveal Laszlo to be a part of a British map-making effort of Sahara under the banner of Royal Geographical Society. It's then that he meets Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), the wife of a fellow pilot (Colin Firth) who is helping with the project. Laszlo and Katharine fall for each other, and so to forbidden tale of love starts.
It sure throbs of melodrama; I would rather like to call it classical. In its defence, it is a well-crafted story brought to screen with great care by British playwright and director Anthony Minghella and based on the prize-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje, that serves up the love of Almasy and Katharinein a way that is simultaneously epic and intimate.
The one flaw in The English Patient- The "modern-day" scenes with Almasy awaiting death aren't as nearly as involving as the flashback sequences. Characters of Hana and Kip aren't fully-realized, though they are on sideline, the scenes that take place in this time frame, some of which are quite lengthy, seem unwanted interruptions.
The English Patient is an epic of life, death, love, sensuality and war. It is heartbreakingly poetic, wonderfully directed, keen importance to detail, and contrast of pain and pleasure. It is a sort of love story that seem rare these days.