'The English Patient' requires your patience, but is worth every moment (The English Patient (Special Edition, DVD))

Member Name: malteser1987

Product:	The English Patient (Special Edition, DVD)
Date:	26/05/09 (10 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Beautiful film, excellent cast, wonderful unpredictable story

Disadvantages: Very long

The English Patient is one of those films that you need to see at some stage. Released over 13 years ago, this remarkable film has qualities that have allowed it to endure and it will continually rank highly in the best movies ever made.

So what makes it so good? Well if you can overlook the near on 3 hours in length, it is at its heart a wonderful love story. Set in a bevvy of beautiful landscapes, with many beautiful actors/actresses to complement the aesthetic of the film, you are led through WW2 from a very different perspective; from the view of a nurse caring for a patient in an abandoned farm house in Tuscany; nursing a severely burnt 'English Patient' who slowly begins to relive his most recent past as Hana the nurse reads from the book he carried with him, and the appearance of a thief who alludes to knowing the patient, helping to stir his memory further and bringing flesh to his love,lust and loss in this epic love story.

The elements of this film which I adhere to, is that sense of formality - the social gatherings, the finely honed, terribly British accents countered against the lustful, forbidden and loving moments shared between Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Count Laszlo de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) behind closed doors and away from her naive husband and the real onset of war in Britain. Hana the nurse also divulges in her own love story - a woman who constantly loses the ones that she loves to the war and tragic circumstance. Her tender care of the Count leaves you heavy hearted as she attempts to hold on to someone who is destined to die.

Ralph Fiennes plays the character excellently. When he is first seen you do not see him as he was but as a raw, bleeding pulp of a human being. He lies in his bed coated in a stretched, filmy tender type of skin and yet that same dry, formal tone ties him to his former self - he is a man who has loved, who has felt pain both physically and emotionally and wants to die. You recognise it, but through his story of loving a married woman and never being able to consumate that love in the one way in which he wanted - for her to be his one, to 'have her' for his own but without owning her and sacrificing everything for the love of her, only to lose her.

It is a wonderful, heart-wrenching tale that needs the dedication of a true film lover. Yes this could be pigeon holed as a 'romance' film, but truely that does not do it justice. Yes it is too long and there was room to cut back, but aesthetically it is beautiful. Being creatively minded, the idea of keeping every memory, finding words to express in the way that touch cannot and that endless sense of wanting the things you cannot have; this film encompasses so many emotions and when you become emotionally invested throughout, then this film will take you through the whole spectrum. I love it; I highly recommend it.

Summary: Beautiful film that needs a dedicated ethusiastic to invest themselves into this remarkable film.