Fools for Love

Minghella has a gift for outsize emotion. When Kip attaches Hana to a rig that sends her bobbing in the air around church frescoes, she's the embodiment of euphoria; and Katharine and Almasy's tragic reunion is an epic heartbreak (too bad Gabriel Yared's inflated music mars its purity). The character of Almasy, a man's man who learns there's more danger and mystery in the indentation of a woman's neck (her "suprasternal notch") than there is in a desert cave, a stiff-necked idealist whom tragedy humanizes, could become -- scar tissue and all -- a yuppie fantasy figure. His long leavetaking from Earth, and the solace of his recollected passion, will touch chords with baby boomers who've lost friends to illnesses like AIDS, or parents to age. There are moments in The English Patient when its blend of time-hopping wit and fierce literacy and poignantly used pop music begs comparison to The Singing Detective.

But this intelligent, affecting work is squishy at the core. Almasy never apologizes to a man who might have been mutilated because of his actions -- he says that nothing concerned him except Katharine. Maybe the boomers' huge pop romance Love Story had broader and more lasting influence than anyone thought. In The English Patient, too, love means never having to say you're sorry -- about anything.

The English Patient
Directed and written by Anthony Minghella, from the novel by Michael Ondaatje; with Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Kristin Scott Thomas, Willem Dafoe, and Naveen Andrews.

Michael Ondaatje reads at the Miami Book Fair International on Sunday, November 24, at 2:30, in the Auditorium at Miami-Dade Community College's Wolfson Campus, 300 NE 2nd Ave. See "Calendar Listings" or call 237-3248 for more information.