If the film exquisitely captures this death-in-life, equally exquisite — and necessary — is its vision of life overcoming death. Juliette Binoche, as Hana, is more innocent than the ravaged character in the book, a fact which makes her ultimate transformation slightly less compelling. But her radiant face, and the blurred green renaissance of the trees as she rides away to a new life in the film's stirring final shot, are an affirmation of hope captured in the purest visual language. And when, in an earlier scene, Kip lifts her up with a pulley to swing high in the air before Renaissance frescoes in a darkened church —the camera dancing over her swaying body, the smoke from her flare illuminating the old, kind faces — it is not just a cinematic tour de force, it is a kind of fulcrum, a moment that balances, delicately but enduringly, the film's terrible weight of death, its terrible weight of love.
From a review of "The English Patient" in Salon
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