Drama · Romance · War
American
1996 · Directed by Anthony Minghella · 162 min
In an abandoned Italian villa near the end of the Second World War, a young nurse stays behind to care for a badly burned man who remembers his past only in fragments. As visitors arrive, his memories carry the film back to the Sahara of the 1930s. A slow, lyrical, adult romance about memory, desire and the cost of loyalty.
Why it matters in cinema history
A defining prestige film of the 1990s, it showed that the old-fashioned widescreen romantic epic could be rebuilt around fractured memory and a literary sensibility.
Watch with intention
Watch the film as memory rather than plot: ask why each present-day moment calls up each past one.
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