'The English Patient' Captures The Unfilmable. By Piers Marchant WHAT TYPE OF stimulant could director Anthony Minghella have been taking when he decided to adapt The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje's complex, lyric novel, for the screen? Film is, after all, a medium of the visual known: light, shadow, color. Nothing as haphazard as words, whose meaning and nuance shift enigmatically from one slippery slope to another. It would seem a particularly daunting task for any director to cope with Ondaatje's novel, which, through its weaving dream narratives and fragments of time, is about everything unknown--beyond the immediately observable. It would seem as unfilmable as the scent of lavender. Despite all this, however, Minghella succeeds in ways both absorbing and extraordinarily moving. The English Patient is a triumph of a film, the best love story you will see this year, exclamation point. The film does not--cannot--match the novel's intricacies or depth, but Minghella (who also wrote the screenplay) has created an interpretation that stands on its own. In scope, the film is epic-like--a love story that takes place over one of the most devastating periods in human history--but it remains both quiet and powerfully intimate. The English Patient does not sweep you along with grand historical gestures. More devastatingly, the lives and memories of the characters are explored to the tiniest textured detail. Their universe hangs on a brush of skin, a few grains of desert sand, a single candle flame. The plot, a dense swirl of memory and intermingled narratives, works like a spell. It is near the end of WWII, Italy. The wounded are getting packed up, the bombs painstakingly defused. In this, Hana (Juliet Binoche), a nurse at the end of her rope, decides to hole up in a deserted, ransacked church with her favorite patient, the severely burned amnesiac Count Almasy (Ralph Fiennes, the misnamed "English" patient of the title) in an attempt to hold onto what little she still has left. Unlike the book, which makes Hana the central figure, the film pulls its story largely from Almasy's life, told in richly textured flashback. Before the war, working for the Geographic Society in North Africa, Almasy falls helplessly in love with Katherine (Kristin Scott Thomas), the wife of one of his fellow explorers, with tragic results. The film becomes a touching, bewitching love story wrapped up in Almasy's head, released in jagged pieces from his tortured memory and cut against Hana's own struggle for peace. It is a film first and foremost about loss. From Almasy himself, whose identity and story are only slowly revealed, to Caravaggio (Willem Defoe) a double-agent thief who lost his thumbs to a sadistic German officer during the war and is busy seeking revenge on everyone even remotely involved; and to Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh demolitions expert who must painstakingly defuse all the live bombs the Germans have left in the area during their retreat. The difference, if any, in their lives is perspective. For Caravaggio and Kip the war continues on, with jobs to do, responsibilities to keep. Hana and Almasy have simply gone beyond the idea that there is anything left to be recouped. As a substitute for the sharp, poetic descriptives of Ondaatje, Minghella and cinematographer John Seale focus their camera on the minutia of the characters' physical space. It is a film of textures, from the grains of sand on human skin to the play of light through a rotted floor board on a rolled up mattress. You get the sense that every shot, every image, is somehow essentially important. And, amazingly, it is. As Almasy, Fiennes finds the twisted, fought-against passion in the man that Katherine alone manages to unlock. He's haunted by memory, burned to a cinder by it just as his face is burned into a smooth, gruesome mask. There's simply nothing left for him to live for, and he knows it. Fiennes' eloquence and deftness serve him well here. And Scott-Thomas is absolutely radiant. Her Katherine is sparkling, strong and lightening fast. The scenes of them together, despairing and hopeful, angry and resilient, are masterful. In a scene near the end of the film, Almasy returns to the severely injured Katherine, where she lies in a cave, waiting for him. His trepidation at returning, the hesitation at entering this dark, cold place where she lies either dead or alive, is a moment of torturous, agonizing courage. In the end, Almasy's despairing accountability becomes a fitting metaphor for the newly emerged post-war civilization. It is with terrible approbation the real horrors of World War II were finally revealed, documented, and burned into history's collective memory. Forgetting hoary Hollywood axioms to the contrary, for Almasy and Katherine, love, in the end, had only the power to overcome fear, not change the tragic events of the world. The English Patient is playing at Century Gateway (792-9000) and Catalina (881-0616) cinemas.

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