The Remains of the Day (1993) is an unforgettable and unorthodox love story originated in a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and the soul of Anthony Hopkins. This James Ivory-directed film must be the most tragic one of all romances since the times of George Stevens' A Place in The Sun (1951).
Featuring also an amazing performance by Emma Thompson, and a cast of names (Christopher Reeve, James Fox and Michael Lonsdale); a revealing camera work; a fine score; a realistically lavish production design, never more appropriate than in this movie dealing with cruelly repressed emotions; an editing work just as sensitive to the undertones as to the chronology --from Pre-World War II England to the Fifties, and backwards.
The unspoken passion has not been translated to the screen, not before nor since, in a better sense. That "book scene" is incomparable.
