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.—Huggo
The 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.—Jwelch5742
In 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]>
The film is set during World War II and depicts a critically burned man, at first known only as "the English patient," who is being looked after by Hana (Juliette Binoche), a French-Canadian nurse in an abandoned Italian monastery. The patient is reluctant to disclose any personal information but through a series of flashbacks, viewers are allowed into his past. It is slowly revealed that he is in fact a Hungarian cartographer, Count Laszlo De Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), who was making a map of the Sahara Desert, and whose affair with a married woman, Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), ultimately brought about his present situation. As the patient remembers more, David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a Canadian intelligence operative and former thief, arrives at the monastery.
Caravaggio lost his thumbs while being interrogated by a German army officer, and he gradually reveals that it was the patient's actions that had brought about his torture. In addition to the patient's story, the film devotes time to Hana and her romance with Kip (Naveen Andrews), an Indian Sikh sapper in the British Army. Due to various events in her past, Hana believes that anyone who comes close to her is likely to die, and Kip's position as a bomb defusing technician makes their romance full of tension.
In the first phase, set in the late 1930s, the minor Hungarian noble Count Laszlo De Almasy (Fiennes) is co-leader of a Royal Geographical Society archaeological and surveying expedition in Egypt and Libya. He and his English partner Madox are at heart academics with limited sophistication in the swirling politics of Europe and North Africa. Shortly after the morale and finances of their expedition are bolstered by a British couple, Geoffrey and Katherine Clifton (Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas) that joins the exploration party. The Count is taken with the gorgeous and refined Katherine.
When Geoffrey is often away from the group on other matters, an affair takes wing. The final months before the war's onset bring an archaeological triumph: the Count's discovery of an ancient Saharan cave decorated with "swimming figure" paintings dating from prehistoric times, the "Cave of Swimmers". This period also sees the romance between Katherine and the Count rise to a sensuous peak. Katherine is plagued with the guilt of infidelity, while the Count shows a streak of jealousy along with an imbalance that will later haunt him.
The fall of 1939 and the war bring all excavation at the cave to a halt, and Madox and the Count go their separate ways. Geoffrey Clifton meanwhile has pieced together the outline of the affair and seeks a sudden and dramatic revenge: crashing his plane, with Katherine aboard, into the Count's desert camp. The wreck kills Geoffrey instantly, seriously injures Katherine, and narrowly misses the Count.
He manages to take Katherine into the relative shelter of the swimming figure cave, leaves her with water, a flashlight, and a fire, then begins his scorching three day walk back to the nearest town and help. The town is held by the British Army, and the dazed and dehydrated Count, with his non-English name, is unable to coherently explain to officials the plane crash and Katherine's plight. Instead, he loses his temper during questioning and is thrown into military jail. He is sent in chains on a train "north to Benghazi", escapes, finds himself behind Afrika Korps lines and quickly trades his desert maps with the Germans for a biplane. By the time he returns to the cave, Katherine is dead - and in all but a physical sense, so is the Count. He manages to bundle Katherine's body into the plane and takes off. Ironically, a German anti-aircraft battery shoots down the plane as Almásy pilots it over the desert. Horribly burned but alive, he is rescued by Bedouin tribesmen.
The film's second phase shifts to Italy and the last months of the war. The Count by now is an invalid patient, and wholly dependent by this time on morphine and the care of his French-Canadian nurse Hana, detached from her medical unit and established in a battered but beautiful Italian monastery. Hana has seen a fiance and a nursing friend die in the Italian campaign, and is left to wonder if her involvement with a British-Indian lieutenant will break her cycle of love and grief or simply continue it.
A visitor to the villa named Caravaggio is in search for the disfigured Count that he believes played a role in his own ill-starred time in Egypt and Libya. For Caravaggio unwittingly stumbled into the wreckage of the Count-Katherine-Geoffrey love triangle, circa 1940-42. He's lost both thumbs in a grisly interrogation at the hands of the Nazis and has since hunted down and killed those he believes responsible for his fate. He believes the Count was part of a web of desert spying and intrigue and knows that he traded maps with the Germans. He confronts him with news of Madox's suicide and posits that the Count killed the Cliftons. Only a full recounting at the villa of the Cliftons' crash and the Count's map dealings with the Germans to recover Katherine bring Caravaggio to understanding and forgiveness.
Hana, too, finds reconciliation at the film's end. Her lieutenant survives a brush with death on the war's last day and her hope in love is rekindled. The Count asks for, and dies of, an overdose of morphine from Hana.
