Love in the Desert. Review on English Patient, The - Michael Ondaatje

This multiple-Oscar-winning film has taken its time opening here,too long,in fact.But now that the screen adaptation of authour Micheal Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning THE ENGLISH PATIENT is here,make sure you dont miss it.

Told in flashbacks,the film is really a astory of love and passion,war and betrayal,personal journeys and forgiveness.All these themes are portrayed through the lives of four characters brought toghter in a ruined monestary in italy at the end of the world war 2.

First there is French-canadian nurse Hana(Binoche/chocolat)who brings her english patient here to care for him even as he is gasping for life.Unable to cope with the atrocities of war any more,having lost those she has loved to it,hana escapes by trying to give dignity to the patient's death

at least.The patient,claiming to suffer from a loss of memery,is covered in burns,the only clues to his identity coming to hana from his copy of Herodotus,which serves also as a scrapbook of his past.

Into their peaceful midst arrives Caravaggio(Dafoe/platoon)who seems to have some connection with the patient,and lastly there is Kip,a rather gentle Sikh bomb disposal expert(Naveen Andrews/Kamasutra) who hana falls in love with.Through quizzing from Caravaggio and hana reading from the book,the story of the dying man emerges.And it is really a story of tragic love.He is count Laszlo de Almasy(Fiennes/Schindler's List),a hungarian mamaker who encounters the very lovely,charming and very married Katherine Clifton(Scott Thomas/Four Weddings and a Funeral) in the midst of the sahara.A fierce and passionate affairs develops that threathens to destroy them and those closest to them-and eventually does.

The unravelling of the patient's past is a catharsis, not only for him too.Plot aside,director Minghella has given THE ENGLISH PATIENT a lyrical quality,with shots of undulating and unending sand dunes,shadows on surfaces,swathes of strak white set against seamless browns,a pace that is as languid as the age in which it is set,and a cast that reads like the Who's who.add to this Ondaatje's wounderful prose and imagination and you have a winner indeed.