"The English Patient."
Directed and screenplay written by Anthony Minghella,
from the novel by Michael Ondaatje.
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche,
Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas.

By GARY KAMIYA

the English Patient," the superb new film by Anthony Minghella, is that rarest of things: a film based on a great contemporary novel. When it comes to literature, Hollywood generally prefers its tomes yellowed with age: Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Henry James. The wonder of "The English Patient," to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, is not so much that it was done well, as that it was done at all. The fictive nature of "The English Patient" makes it an even more implausible choice. It is superficially understandable why a filmmaker would be drawn to the tale: it is a haunted love story, centered around an event of searing drama, set in exotic locales and described with cinematic vividness. But it is also a complex and polyphonic work of literature, mingling the separate stories of four characters in a dense tapestry of memory and desire, hope and loss. Above all, it is a supremely verbal construction, almost a poem disguised as a novel. Ondaatje's language, always, takes center stage — gliding and soaring, drifting into the hidden rooms of his character's souls, striking dissonant chords, floating above destinies with Godlike power in one sentence, burrowing into the muddy terror of a bomb crater in the next. The book has an iron-hard spine, but its narrative heart is inextricably entwined with the splendor of its language. How do you make a film of such a book? Minghella wisely avoids literalism. He cuts to the love affair at the heart of the book, trimming back the parallel plots; he reduces the mystery element and skillfully reduces the book's endless, ever-tightening flashbacks. Finally, he makes sparing but judicious use of Ondaatje's glorious language, avoiding the excessively external and "literary" device of voiceover by turning some of the novel's most lyrical lines into dialogue. Inevitably, much is lost: there are colors, moods, ideas in the novel that the film simplifies or simply fails to convey. The young Indian soldier, Kip, is so severely truncated that the film has to veer ever so slightly into sentimentality to replace his redemptive function. And, also inevitably when dealing with translated poetry, certain images that had hovered in the mind's half-known shadows disappoint when they appear in all their vulgar visual finality. But all in all, "The English Patient" does justice to its parent work — and in the process, it illuminates the respective domains of film and fiction, their strengths and weaknesses, their unexpected similarities. One of the most enjoyable things about this film is watching how cinematic devices can achieve the same effects that words do — following two very different roads that take you, somehow, to the same place. "The English Patient" centers around a wrecked life. That life belongs to a mysterious, horribly burned man, who claims not to remember his name and is known only as the "English patient," who lies near death in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. He is cared for by a quietly desperate young nurse, Hana, herself a victim of the war. A young Sikh bomb-disposal expert named Kip and a shadowy thief with bandaged hands named Caravaggio come to the villa, setting in motion two opposing themes: Kip, through his quiet love, helps bring Hana back to life, while the bitter Caravaggio, seeking revenge for what was done to him by the Germans, forces the English patient to confess who he really was, who he loved and how, as he says, he "died." The tale takes us back in time, into the North African desert in the '30s, where the burned man — his real name Almasy — was one of a band of international explorers mapping unknown territory. Into their midst arrive an intrepid flyer, Clifton, and his wife, Katharine. Almasy and Katharine fall in love and begin a desperately passionate affair. Love affairs portrayed in art rarely feel right. They are too quirkily personal, too funny, too distanced, too considered, too flat. Or maybe these are accurate reflections of the way most of us love. The love affair between Almasy and Katharine Clifton is different. As told by Ondaatje, writing in blood, it exists so deeply inside their pain and yearning that it becomes, oddly, utterly anonymous. Their anguish summons up an army of ghostly lovers who played and lost, all of us ordinary, all doomed. Great love contains an absence, an inwardness, a mysterious loss, at its heart — and language captures that absence and mystery better than film. But Minghella, by brilliantly editing the romantic scenes down to a few jagged, archetypal moments, captures something of the sacred whirlwind. He is assisted by superb acting: Ralph Fiennes, who plays the English patient, and Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays Katharine Clifton, are brilliant — dazed by their destinies, knowing that nothing else matters and they are trapped, forever. If it did nothing more than capture their passion, "The English Patient" would be remembered as one of the most searingly romantic films of our time. But what elevates the taut, almost formal desperation of their performances to the realm of tragedy is the film's sense of overwhelming fatality. Their story seems to have always already ended, even when it is going on. For the indispensable element in the book, the one thing that the film had to catch if it was to work at all, was pastness — the sense of fate, of the permanent backwards glance, of the bittersweet finality of memory. Minghella, opting for a less convoluted time-structure than found in the novel, does not shift time-gears as fluidly or frequently as Ondaatje. (If he tried to, the result would probably be more hallucinatory than revelatory.) But he skillfully intermingles the present and the past. His most obvious, but still effective, device is simply to return, after flashback sequences, to the ravaged face of Fiennes, remembering. More subtle is the film's enigmatic opening shot, a brush painting swimming figures on paper: we don't realize until much later that the hand belongs to Katharine Clifton, and that her drawing of those pictographs was the beginning of the love affair that was to end with her alone, in darkness, in the very cave where those ancient figures were inscribed. The cumulative effect of such beautifully controlled flashbacks is to put the viewer in the English patient's bed, drowning one in a past that has taken over the present. 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.