BY MARGARET A. McGURK
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The English Patient is a gorgeous movie, old-fashioned in the very best sense - majestic, passionate, mysterious and thrilling.

Shot in Italy and North Africa, the film is a cinematic feast beginning with the opening shots of the desert from high in the air, the undulating sand dunes as sensuous as a nude.

Based on the prize-winning novel by Canadian author Michael Ondaatje, the movie follows overlapping stories about casualties of love and war.

Juliette Binoche plays Hana, a war-weary nurse who, in the closing days of the war, takes charge of the unidentified burn victim (Ralph Fiennes) of the film's title, moving him into a crumbling monastery while he waits to die.

Over time, they are joined by Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh bomb-disposal officer, and Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a thief with a mysterious grudge against the patient.

Their tragic stories unwind at the same time that we learn from flashbacks that the patient is a Hungarian nobleman named Almasy who spent the prewar years on a British desert expedition.

His memories are dominated by Katharine, the wife of a fellow explorer. Kristin Scott Thomas lights up the screen as a melancholy beauty in a corrupt world, and she knocks Almasy off his feet like a lightning bolt. The two are swept away, overcome and obsessed by one another in a doomed affair.

The movie contains a few shots of frank nudity, but the camera doesn't need to linger on bare skin to convey the heat between the lovers. Even simple glances are charged with roaring eroticism.

The characters in the desert grapple with the gathering threat of war; in Italy they face war's bloody aftermath. In both cases, people are wounded, even ravaged, yet drawn together in partnerships of healing.

The joy beneath the pain comes alive in a scene when Kip rigs a kind of trapeze for Hana so she can see frescos high in a bombed-out church; it echoes the breathtaking moment when Almasy finds a cave in the desert inscribed with primitive drawings of swimmers.

It is testimony to the strength of this haunting story that it can sustain its fascination for every minute of its 21/2-hour-plus length.

Director Anthony Minghella and producer Saul Zaentz, and their immensely talented cast, deserve kudos for bringing this rare story to such glorious life on screen.

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IF YOU GO:

The English Patient
4 stars
(R; sexuality, violence, language) Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas. 161 minutes. At National Amusements.