Too long, too sandy, too self-absorbed, and plainly stupid too! Other than that? an excellent cast of actors giving commendable performances to ill defined characters! I might be disappointing a friend who particularly asked me to evaluate this movie with these conclusions but stupidity is not my kind of approach when it comes to the subject of love.
Did he really think she was going to survive waiting for him to come back with help in the middle of nowhere? Wasnt it better for him to stay by her side and accompany her to die?
I guess that, as romantic as some erroneously think I am, I am way more pragmatic than the lovers of this story. A shallow melodrama between two who are not even likable is not my cup of tea! Much less when it overstretches for 162 minutes.
Other aspects I found absurd –since they did not contributed to the story– were the nurse love affair with a local who disarms bombs, the quest for revenge from a soldier outlandishly named Caravaggio and the fact that it took what it seemed forever before the nurse finished reading the book in possession of all the memories of the English patient.
A ridiculously absurd melodrama! One that I would have loved applying euthanasia at the end of the first hour of film, if not because I had promised to write this review.