“The English Patient” was directed by Anthony Minghella. It is based on the book with the same title written by Michael Ondaatje. Both wrote the screenplay. It stars Ralph Fiennes as Lazlo Almasy and Kristin Scott Thomas as his partner. This film won nine Oscars in 1996.
The film is set in the North of Africa and Italy before and during the II World War. Most of the story takes place in the Sahara Desert and in an old Italian villa.
The film is about a man called Lazlo Almasy, a Hungarian Count who is an explorer and cartographer employed by the Royal Geographical Society to make maps of the Sahara Desert. But the story has other topics: romances, war, exploration and discovery (of the Desert and of the characters too). At the beginning Lazlo Almasy is a man nicknamed “the English patient” because nobody knows his name. The American soldiers find him dying in the desert. He is burned in a plane crash and a Canadian nurse looks after him. The English patient takes him a book of Herodoto with a lot of notes and Hana, the nurse, reads a paragraph every day. She starts to know his story through the notes which appears in the film in a series of flashbacks. She discovers a man who is an explorer, an adventurer who works in the Sahara Desert during many years for several governments and institutions. He meets an English woman, she is his colleague’s wife, and they fall in love. One day, the colleague and his wife pick up Count Almasy in his plane and they crash. His colleague dies and Almasy takes his lover to a Cave of Swimmers because she is seriously injured. He goes to ask for help after he promises her that he will go back. Behind this love story is the Second World War and other romance between the nurse and a British Indian lieutenant.
I strongly recommend “The English Patient”. It is a drama, but it is a very romantic story. It has a beautiful picture and soundtrack. Also because the character of Count Almasy is based on the real Count Lazlo Almasy, explorer of the Sahara Desert and discoverer of the Cave of Swimmers, where he found prehistoric pictures.
Cave of Swimmers:
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