The English Patient well deserves the fulsome praise critics have bestowed, and then some. Filmmaking like this happens but rarely. Indeed, from the first frames on, the film does not so much tell a story as cast a spell.

This achievement is very largely the work of screenwriter and director Anthony Minghella, who adapted Michael Ondaatje's best-selling novel, the 1992 winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. The nonlinear and densely poetic character of Ondaatje's tragic love story made it an unlikely candidate for the dicey task of translation to the screen. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Minghella has somehow managed to crawl inside the "spirit" of the novel, helped along the way by the novelist and Saul Zaentz, Hollywood's notably literary producer(Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

Romance is one of the hardest events to render on the screen or, for that matter, anywhere else. Perfect pitch is required, and most often filmmakers dodge between tough carnal realism, consisting mostly of fevered rutting, and a fantasyland where pretty people stroll sunset beaches to Muzak. Folks look like they are in love, so they must be; how they got there and what it means, well, take our image for it.

In an earlier film, Truly, Madly, Deeply-which explores, with uncommon insight and wit, what it means to lose a spouse and love again-Minghella had already shown a determination to avoid such glib devices. To its lasting credit,The English Patienttakes romance with the utmost seriousness, alternately charting its glory, its obtuseness, and its poignance.

The film's opening sequence, gorgeously riveting and more than a little cryptic, sets the tone for all that follows. An aging biplane flies over the undulating sand hills of the Sahara, the passenger trailing what looks to be a long silk flying scarf. Before very long, German antiaircraft fire hits the plane, igniting a searing, engulfing flare of stark white light.

The story then cuts to the dark of a troop train of wounded soldiers and the tender ministrations of Canadian army nurse Hana (the luminous Juliette Binoche), whose care is devoted to the English patient of the title: hideously burned, his face a seared parchment, his body maimed, his lungs a crisp. (We eventually gather that he piloted the doomed plane of the opening sequence.) Hana arranges to attend him by herself in a bombed-out monastery atop a hill in the lush Tuscan countryside-a quiet place where he can die with a measure of peace. The chapel becomes the sick room, and as Hana cares for her patient, regularly easing his pain with morphine, she reads aloud from his worn copy of Herodotus, the "father" of history. In turn, the patient gives his own history, gradually recalling those events that have led to his present condition as "toast," as he wryly puts it. Thereafter the film slides between present events in Tuscany and the patient's recollections of his years before World War II in North Africa, and this later strain composes the chief narrative enticement of the film.

One mystery soon solved is that the nameless English patient isn't English at all but Hungarian, and a count at that, a rueful solitary mapmaker, really an explorer, who loves the desert. A product of Europe's disaffected intelligentsia, he has gone to the Sahara on an objectless quest, and there in its mute vastness he finds silence, which seems the perfect echo of his soul. The film sparely renders all this with a few trenchant lines and some haunting glimpses of the desert (done lavishly by John Seale). Also helpful is the look of lean asceticism in actor Ralph Fiennes, who plays the wandering count; millennia before he might have died a desert monk. Mostly, though, he seems to relish the fire in the sky and the sand, and these he loves. The desert fire so tallies with Almasy's own sense of self that he calls the heart "an organ of fire."

Yet even as his character is sketched in, Count Almasy remains an enigma, a seeming patchwork of romantic contradiction. He speaks many languages but talks little; he exalts silence, courting its brooding emptiness, but unaware sings always the up-tempo pop tunes of the 30s; remote and imperturbable, he longs for connection. All of this comes to focus on the person of Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), the restless new wife of a British aristocrat. An accomplished and daring pilot, Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth) has come to the Sahara to join Almasy's international team of cartographers; his real mission, however, is to case the area for the British military.

Katherine's intelligence, bravado, and aquiline beauty interest Almasy, even as he acts standoffish, as if trying to throw obstacles in their path. For her part, Katherine senses in Almasy an intensity of spirit lacking in her jaunty Brit flier. Thrown together during a desert storm, their deep resonance becomes unmistakable and, soon after, irresistible, and before long they are marooned in their own private storm. When finally they couple, it is with an unlovely ferocity. And then, too, it lacks the fabled bliss of romantic rapture, for, as people of honor, both lovers loathe the deceit of their liaison, and Katherine loves her husband still. But love each other they do, in spite or because of themselves. The reluctant count ends up enmeshed and obsessed, even as Katherine breaks off the relationship, largely in moral self-disgust. At last the filmmakers ascribe, in gorgeous photography and staging, a wrenching beauty to the depths of their ill-fated love.

Hana's story unfolds in counterpoint to this star-crossed liaison. She has her own catalogue of loss; she fears that she curses whomever she loves, for they all die. Then she meets Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh serving as a sapper in the British army. One day as Hana plays Bach on a broken-down piano at the monastery, Kip rushes in to warn her, just in time, of the German habit of hiding bombs in musical instruments. Kip and his cohort set their tents in the courtyard while they clear the surrounding roads of mines. A thoughtful, gentle man whose work it is to defuse death, Kip entices Hana from grief back to life. Minghella's most rapturous scene features Kip lighting Hana's way through the darkness to gaze, awestruck, at the glad faces in the frescoes high in the clerestory of a nearby church.

Perhaps Minghella's finest accomplishment is to inscribe the film with a dense fabric of imagery, verbal and visual, that resonates and deepens through multiple layers of storytelling. (So, for instance, the uncanny serenity of the frescoes in the dark church plays against a sequence of images from the parallel story, in which Almasy and Katherine gaze in wonder at ancient, mysterious figures painted on the wall of a desert cave.) Taking this into account, it is easy to argue thatThe English Patientposes the question of what and how to love after the death of God-for the impulse to connect, to invest love with ultimate authority and value, stubbornly persists among men and women like a vestigial organ that brings little but trouble.

About this, the circumstances of the story are quite clear. The telling takes place in a bombed and abandoned monastery, and the patient and his love story occupy the center of what was its chapel. The rapacity of war has discredited traditional claims about the presence of love in human affairs. The only remnant of the monastery's business is a large ironwork crucifix that Hana deploys as a scarecrow in her new garden, which is where she meets Kip and which is for her a place of innocence and delight, as when late one night she plays alone a fervid game of hopscotch. And in the garden at the war's end these new celebrants of love dance the dying patient through the rain, nature's gift of new life. Depending on how far one wishes to push such interpolation, the dying patient literally displaces the dying Christ.

This would indeed sound like romantic exaltation if it were not for the film's utter clarity about the fruit of the illicit love between Almasy and Katherine. Their choices change them irrevocably, especially Almasy, who grows increasingly possessive and crude. When hostilities erupt, the personal and the political are brutally entwined, and in the wake of their obsessive affair, replete with massive betrayal, countless bodies litter the sands of the desert; all the principals, and many more, end up very dead. This is romance without the gauzy focus and war without the heroics.

T. S. Eliot observes in "Little Gidding" that humans are invariably "consumed by either fire or fire," meaning either human passion or divine love. The intense fire Almasy pursues in the desert and then in Katherine finally consumes them both. That "the heart is an organ of fire" is a proposition the film drives home with great force, but with little sense of the redemption from "fire by fire" that Eliot proposes.

On its own terms, though, the film offers a more hopeful alternative. If the character of romantic love as exemplified by Almasy and Katherine is exclusive and "uxorious" (a word used early in the film), Hana and Kip have other tasks than loving one another. Hana cares for the wounded; Kip makes the world safe again. As they part, they promise to meet again in the church where they beheld Piero della Francesca's frescoes depicting the glory of humanity and of angels, where Hana, herself soaring, was transfigured by light.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.

Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 12

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