A firmament in the midst of the waters: Dimensions of love in The English Patient

Stenberg, Douglas

Graves at my command

Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth

By my so potent art. But this rough magic

I here abjure; and when I have requir'd

Some heavenly music (which even now I do)

To work mine end upon their senses that

This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fadoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.

-The Tempest

What we have now are two stories, one with the pace and detail of a 300 page novel and one that is the length of a vivid and subtle film. Each has its own organic structure. There are obvious differences and values but somehow each version deepens the other And what is most interesting to me about the film now is how scenes and emotions and values from the book emerged in new ways, were re-invented, were invented with totally new moments, and fit within a dramatic arc that was different from the arc of the book. Quite honestly now the territories and maps are blurred as to what is new, what is mine, what was Anthony's, what was Saul [Zaentz] or Ralph Fiennes or Juliette Binoche, what was Walter Murch. What you have is a communal story made by many hands.

-Michael Ondaatje, "About Anthony Minghella's Screenplay"

For Anthony Minghella, The English Patient

is above all a romantic film.... Almasy and Katharine, the central protagonists ... feel a fatal inevitability to their love. It's as if an irresistible force is bringing them together and they're helpless in the face of their destiny. And their destiny is affected by everything around them . . . a love story complicated by war, a spy story complicated by love. But it's told with scale because the nature of love in the film has repercussions over time and continents. It's about tiny details on a big canvas ("Press Kit" 12).

Critics have tended to agree. Janet Maslin writes that "Anthony Minghella's beautiful film told love stories while it also reinvented the romance of the big screen" (C9) and Joseph McBride considers the film "a multilayered story of an ill-fated love affair . . . a haunting, beautifully crafted mood piece about the vagaries of love against the backdrop of World War II" ("The Patient Englishman"). For Time, the "lovers are Ralph Fiennes-all coiled sexiness, threat shrouded in hauteur-and Kristen Scott Thomas, who has the gift of making intelligence erotic; they come together in a dance of doom that is abrasive, mysterious, powerful, inevitable" ("The Best Cinema of 1996" 72).

Romance is unquestionably the catalyst for the worlds Ondaatje and Minghella summon and release. And indeed, their creative fusion reveals dimensions and motifs of natural phenomena reflected over the ages: water flows through time, bodies merge with landscapes, hands reach across history, and shadows dance with light as memory is unearthed. Through all this, both the writer and the director reveal that lovers, in order to sound the depths of their experience, may share a life illuminated by their sensitivity to time and history. Thus, human experience is translated against the kaleidoscope of time and space. As George Hatza writes,

The discovery of prehistoric cave paintings in the desert mirror frescoes painted on the walls of an Italian church-both sites separated by time and a war, in which two different couples fall in love . . . the swirling hills of the desert segue into the folded topography of the bed linens clinging to a patient under the care of a French-Canadian nurse during the waning days of World War II. (A9)

Minghella considers Ondaatje's novel "an enormously emotional reservoir, this well of feeling" (CBS Sunday Morning). His statement that he "had plunged into the well of [the novel]" only to discover that "there was a film there" (Smith 22) hints at the motif of water essential to both works. The opening of the film has the newly painted replica of a swimmer merging with the waves of dunes in a desert sea. Almasy lies in cave water as the Bedouin doctor applies balm to his charred face. Later, Almasy echoes Katharine's plea that she is "dying for rain." Hana goes over his torso with a washcloth in keeping with Ondaatje's novel: "Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet.... Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint" (3). She declares, "It's raining," before Almasy is joyfully taken on a stretcher around the pool in the middle of a downpour. During Almasy's seaside interview, he looks into Hana's eyes as he drinks water from the container she holds. Likewise, Katharine in her pearls has lived by the sea: "She was always happier in rain, in bathrooms steaming with liquid air, in sleepy wetness, climbing back in from his window that rainy night in Cairo and putting on her clothes while still wet, in order to hold it all" (170). When Hana is suspended in the cathedral, she seems to be floating and swimming as a shadowy echo of the figures in the Cave of Swimmers. And Kip himself, in the scene from the novel which inspired Hana's ascent, "was now aware of the depth of this church, not its height. The liquid sense of it. The hollowness and darkness of a well" (72). Finally, Hana's tear is the last image of water in the film before she looks toward the waves of light along the road from the monastery.

Hana feels that the English patient is "a pool for her" (41 )-an "ebony pool" (48)-while "the rattle in her intimate breath" is "as deep as stones within a river" (105). When playing music, she has "paused after each set of notes as if bringing her hands out of water to see what she had caught, then continued, placing down the main bones of the tune" (63). She is "focused and submerged within [Almasy's] crabbed handwriting in his thick-leaved seabook of maps and texts. There is even a small fern glued into it" (97-98). Hana wants to show Kip the rivers of Canada while "Caravaggio would explain to her how she could sink into love . . . sink into cautious love" (130). Even Almasy's imprint before the Cave of Swimmers is echoed with Hana and Kip: "Her hand gripped him as mud had clung along the bank of the Moro River, his fist plunging into the wet earth to stop himself slipping back into the already crossed torrent" (104).

Almasy plunges into a "well of memory" (4), swallows Hana's "words like water" (5), and smells "an odour of the sea" in the Bedouin doctor's perfumes (10). He claims, "I have always had information like a sea in me" (18) and knows, based on rock engravings in Tassili, that "the Sahara people hunted water horses from reed boats" (18). Almasy also believes that "in the desert you celebrate nothing but water" (23). Indeed, for the early Egyptians the world ended where there was no water (135), and we are told to ask

a mariner what is the oldest known sail, and he will describe a trapezoidal one hung from the mast of a reed boat that can be seen in rock drawings from Nubia. Pre-dynastic. Harpoons are still found in the desert. These were water people. Even today caravans look like a river. Still, today it is water who is the stranger here. Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth. (19)

Water symbolizes the essence of Almasy's love for Katharine: "Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth" (173). Almasy "sees her in differing hours and locations that alter her voice or nature, even her beauty, the way the background power of the sea cradles or governs the fate of lifeboats" (219). And the question is asked regarding their relationship, "Seas move away, why not lovers?. . The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn" (238). For Almasy, the most loved waters in the desert, "like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hand, enter your throat. One swallows absence. A woman in Cairo curves the white length of her body up from the bed and leans out of the window into a rainstorm to allow her nakedness to receive it" (141). Almasy in fact researches "back past Herodotus to the Kitab al Kanuz, where Zerzura-is named after the bathing woman in a desert caravan" (153). In the film, his drawing of Zerzura and the location of the Cave of Swimmers seem to be one. As Ondaatje indicates, time and water merge through their love:

In the few hours they have, the room has darkened to this pitch of light. Just river and desert light. Only when there is the rare shock of rain do they go towards the window and put their arms out, stretching, to bathe as much as they can of themselves in it. Shouts towards the brief downpour fill the streets. (156)

The English Patient "opens with a dazzling enigmatic aerial vista of the desert from the cockpit of an airplane. The sandy, flesh-colored landscape dips and curves, creating the illusion of a human body, more specifically the female form . . . the locale takes on anthropomorphic characteristics" (Hatza). Indeed, anthropomorphism and geomorphology, "that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and storyteller" (246), resonate throughout the film. Almasy claims parts of Katharine's body, like the supersternal notch, after telling Madox, "You can't explore from the air. If you could explore from the air, life would be very simple." As they lie on the bed in his apartment, Katharine's back resembles a mountain against the landscape of white sheets. This image recalls Almasy's translated description "a mountain in the shape of a woman's back" as a plane descends bringing Katharine to the desert for the first time. Through touch, which begins with his hand on the small of her back as he falls in love during their dance (242), Almasy essentially explores her physical geography in ways that the air-bound Clifton will never know. And Clifton in the end can only crash his plane into the earth while attempting to kill the three of them.

Ondaatje provided Minghella with numerous anthropomorphic and geomorphologic images and metaphors. When Hana bent toward her patient, "he put his dark fingers into her hair and felt it cool within the valley of his fingers" (42). Later, she "touches his foot with the hand that holds the ladybird. It leaves her, moving onto the dark skin. Avoiding the sea of white sheet, it begins to make the long trek towards the distance of the rest of his body, a bright redness against what seems like volcanic flesh" (207). In Africa, the Bedouin taught Almasy to "drag strength into his body from the universe . . . He saw the moving veins of flamingos across his sight in the half-darkness of the covered sun" (9). Almasy referred to the Gilf Kebir as "our heart" (135) and has seen "the tall row of traveller's palms above them, their outstretched wrists. The way [Katharine's] head and hair were above him, when she was his lover" (157). He would dive from her shoulder into the small indentation at her throat called the Bosphorus (236) and he loved the pale aureole of the vaccination scar on her arm (158). In essence, these lovers recreate their own landscapes:

In the apartment there is light only from the river and the desert beyond it. It falls upon her neck her feet the vaccination scar he loves on her right arm. She sits on the bed hugging her nakedness. He slides his open palm along the sweat of her shoulder. This is my shoulder, he thinks, not her husband's, this is my shoulder. As lovers they have offered parts of their bodies to each other, like this. In this room on the periphery of the river. (156)

Hana sees Kip as "the brownness of a rock, the brownness of a muddy storm-fed river" ( 105). Her lover "has mapped her sadness more than any other" (270) and she lays "her face against the upper reaches of his arm, that dark brown river. . . to wake submerged within it, against the pulse of an unseen vein in his flesh beside her" (125). Hana "learns all the varieties of his darkness . loves most the wet colours of his neck when he bathes. And his chest with its sweat which her fingers grip when he is over her, and the dark, tough arms in the darkness of his tent" (127) touched "with his slight fingers as if it too belonged to his body, a khaki wing he folds over himself during the night. It is his world" (128).

Minghella likewise emphasizes the significance of touch and hands. Almasy puts his hand in the ancient imprint at the entrance of the Cave of Swimmers immediately after an Egyptian worker cups his hands in a prayer to Allah. Katharine soon thereafter paints a hand from the walls of the Cave as a gift to Almasy. That night her hand touches the glass of the truck window as the sandstorm blows outside. Before they are rescued in the desert, Almasy touches Katharine's cheek with the back of his hand. This recalls a moment described in the novel: "Then he came up to her, closer, and she thought for a moment he was going to embrace her. "Instead he put his right arm forward and drew it in a gesture across her bare neck so her skin was touched by the whole length of his damp forearm" (152). Caravaggio's hands are maimed, while Madox takes some sand in his hand and puts it in his pocket before saying farewell to Almasy. Almasy and Katharine then hold hands before their last kiss in the Cave. Finally, he uses his hand to push morphine ampules towards Hana as a request for his own death. Indeed, Almasy asks the following regarding the love of his life:

How do I explain her to you? With the use of my hands? The way I can arc out in the air the shape of a mesa or rock? She had been part of the expedition for almost a year.... Later, when we were aware of mutual desire, the previous moments flooded back into the heart, now suggestive, that nervous grip of an arm on the cliff, looks that had been missed or misinterpreted. (235)

The potential for lovers to share a kind of spiritual literacy pervades both works. Whereas Clifton has known Katharine since she was a child and remembers their first wedding anniversary, Almasy falls in love with her through the "father of history" Herodotus. Furthermore, he tells Katharine after she recites the story of Candaules and Gyges that Herodotus is "your friend." Clifton, however, is described as "the New Age, flying over and dropping codes of long coloured ribbon to advise us where we should be" (229). With "a family genealogy going back to Canute," he remains "a man embedded in the English machine" (237). The first conversation Clifton has with Almasy involves adjectives for a car. Although the husband dismisses a broken car as "not much use," Katharine will spend a crucial night with her future lover in a truck trapped by the sandstorm. There Almasy touches her hair and describes ancient winds. Later, Clifton is looking at a map as he talks to Katharine over the phone. Almasy himself has questioned in his notes whether Clifton truly notices her, echoing Ondaatje's sentence, "I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon . . . as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife" (4).

Almasy believes that words are "much more tricky than violins" (37), "have a power" (234), and "direct us into corners" (121). He recalls that Clifton's "praise of [Katharine] meant nothing. But I am a man whose life in many ways, even as an explorer, has been governed by words. By rumours and legends. Charted things. Shards written down" (231). Clifton talks of his wife's perpetual bathing, but Almasy will join her in the bath. Her love of water has historical resonance for him: "Zerzura is named after the bathing woman in a desert caravan. And there too the slow blink of a fan's shadow. And here too the intimate exchange and echo of childhood history, of scar, of manner of kiss" (153). In the film, Katharine accepts Cairo as a "different world" where she is a "different wife." The lovers create their own spiritual reality:

Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumour of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city. (154)

What is more, Hana and Kip share spiritual insights:

At night, when she lets his hair free, he is once more another constellation, the arms of a thousand equators against his pillow, waves of it between them in their embrace and in their turns of sleep. She holds an Indian goddess in her arms, she holds wheat and ribbons. As he bends over her it pours. She can tie it against her wrist. As he moves she keeps her eyes open to witness the gnats of electricity in his hair in the darkness of the tent. (218)

Both the film and the novel make a strong case against nationalism. This position is defiantly presented by Almasy at the final dinner party: "The International Sand Clubmisfits, buggers, fascists, and fools. God bless us, everyone." He then denigrates several world leaders. And in the novel we know that Hana's "war was over" (51) and that she "would not be ordered again to carry out duties for the greater good. She would care only for the burned patient" (14). Madox knew "two or three people in his life, and they had turned out now to be the enemy" (241). Furthermore, Caravaggio, who is nearby as Almasy eventually rides "the raft of morphine," is "also caught, a citizen of morphia with him" (243).

Almasy, of course, identifies with Herodotus who writes, "This history of mine . . . has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument" (119). He sees him "more as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piecing together a mirage. . . cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history-how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love" (118-19). And if World War II is the "main argument" of the time, Almasy tells Caravaggio that "nothing else mattered" other than returning to the Cave for Katharine. Almasy may deny the existence of God during his farewell with Madox (241), but he nevertheless acknowledges to himself during his journey away from Katharine that "There is God only in the desert.... Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war. Financial and military despots shaped the world" (250). The desert is for Almasy "trompe l'oeil of time and water" (259) where he learned everything he knew (177). Consider then his disdain for armies that "would come through the desert with no sense of what it was. The deserts of Libya. Remove politics, and it is the loveliest phrase I know. Libya. A sexual, drawn-out word, a coaxed well" (257). Almasy speaks of the most beautiful human beings he has ever met in his life, the "rivers of desert tribes" for whom Europeans are insignificant. Indeed, as the explorers gradually became "nationless," Almasy "came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. Madox died because of nations" ( 138). And despite Alma sy's attempts to claim parts of Katharine's body/landscape, he knows that it remains impossible to own the desert, "a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed" (13839). Naturally, Almasy's allegiance is to the nationless expanse:

I do not believe I entered a cursed land, or that I was ensnared in-a situation that was evil. Every place and person was a gift to me. Finding the rock paintings in the Cave of Swimmers. Singing "burdens" with Madox during expeditions. Katharine's appearance among us in the desert. The way I would walk towards her over the red polished concrete floor and sink to my knees, her belly against my head as if I were a boy. The gun tribe healing me. Even the four of us, Hana and you and the sapper. (257)

Katharine's death in the Cave of Swimmers is foreshadowed throughout the novel and film. Note that in the desert she reads the phrase "moral labyrinth" on the piece of paper containing Almasy's notes about her. In the monastery, Almasy and Hana initially "were very cold, without electricity" (13) and "used only essential candlelight at night" (14). What is more, Hana's actions echo Katharine's final attempts to preserve the light before she dies: "She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she also breathes in light" (14). Later, Ondaatje writes of "Hana's slow voice when wind flattened the candle flame beside her, the page dark for a moment" (111).

Given that the church with the frescoes seems cavernous even when illuminated, the shared pledge of Hana and Kip, "I will always go back to that church," echoes the farewell of Katharine and Almasy in the Cave of Swimmers. And just as Kip after Hardy's death briefly withdraws from Hana before their reconciliation, "In the cave, after all those months of separation and anger, they had come together and spoken once more as lovers, rolling away the boulder they had placed between themselves for some social law neither had believed in" (171). Almasy returns to the Cave in the film much sooner than the novel's span of three years. Ondaatje writes: "He was among the familiar paintings he had found years earlier.... Several figures in the unmistakable posture of swimmers. Bermann had been right about the presence of an ancient lake. He walked farther into the coldness, into the Cave of Swimmers, where he had left her. She was still there. She had dragged herself into a corner, had wrapped herself tight in the parachute material. He had promised to return for her" (169-70). Whereas the film emphasizes the farewell vows of the lovers, Ondaatje has Almasy paint his love in the colors of history before she dies in a "holy place":

He looked up to the one cave painting and stole the colours from it. The ochre went into her face, he daubed blue around her eyes. He walked across the cave, his hands thick with red, and combed his fingers through her hair. Then all of her skin, so her knee that had poked out of the plane that first day was saffron. The pubis. Hoops of colour around her legs so she would be immune to the human. There were traditions he had discovered in Herodotus in which old warriors celebrated their loved ones by locating and holding them in whatever world made them eternal-a colourful fluid, a song, a rock drawing. (248)

The English Patient allows lovers to transcend time. Minghella responds, "the film is a very ambitious one in the way it tells the story. It isn't a `and then and then' beginning, middle, and end story; it's a puzzle" (Smith 25). Note as well the initial ambiguity of tense in Almasy's statement in the Cave, "Every night I cut out my heart, but in the morning it was full again." The love he shares with Katharine echoes "a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own" (140), while Hana has been "immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams" (12).

Almasy believes that "When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently.... But all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur" (259). On another level, Hana and Kip spend "one month in their lives when [they] sleep beside each other. A formal celibacy between them. Discovering that in lovemaking there can be a whole civilisation, a whole country ahead of them" (225). Ondaatje then expands the scope of the novel: "Wherever Hana is now, in the future, she is aware of the line of movement Kip's body followed out of her life. Her mind repeats it" (282). And just as Minghella offers a flashback of Almasy flying over the desert with his beloved after he has died by Hana's side, the novel's conclusion touches upon the parabolic dimension lovers may share: "And so Hana moves and her face turns and in a regret she lowers her hair. Her shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles" (301-02). Finally, Katharine in the film and Almasy in the novel translate their experience as a credo of love:

And all the names of the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer. Such glory of this country she enters now and becomes part of. We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography-to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

I carried Katharine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds. (261)

While Minghella's screenplay originally included "episodes involving goat mutilation, scores of new characters, and a scene about the destruction of a wisteria tree in Dorset" ("About The English Patient" 16), echoes of plot and characterization abound in the novel and the finished film. Hana has slept next to the dead during the war (49) and reads Alma-sy to eternal sleep. Likewise, he lies down beside his dead Katharine in keeping with Ondaatje's "Felhomaly. The dusk of graves. With the connotation of intimacy there between the dead and the living" (170). Hana declares, "Kip and I are both international bastards-born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere" (176). Almasy refers to himself as "another international bastard" (251 ) as well. Kip's candles in seashells echo the tapers at the final dance party of the International Sand Club. Whereas Almasy tells Katharine about winds opposed by armies, Kip speaks to Hana "of warrior saints and she now feels he is one, stern and visionary, pausing only in these rare times of sunlight to be godless." Indeed, Hana "imagines all of Asia through the gestures of this one man" (217). Almasy loves Katharine's supersternal notch, while Kip beholds a "scene [that] depicts a bedroom where a woman is in conversation with an angel. The woman's curly brown hair reveals itself under the loose blue cape, the fingers of her left hand touching her breastbone" (279). Early in the film Hana feeds her patient a "plum plum." This is an echo of the fruit Almasy eats before he tells Katharine, "Swoon, I'll catch you" at the Christmas party in Cairo. Ondaatje, however, provides the initial image: "she bends over his body and places a third of the plum into his mouth. His open mouth holds it, like water, the jaw not moving. He looks as if he will cry from this pleasure. She can sense the plum being swallowed" (45).

Chekhov wrote in "About Love," "I realized that when you love you must either, in your reasoning about that love, start from what is higher, more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning, or you must not love at all" (395). Likewise, happiness and virtue in The English Patient yield to the catalysts of human frailty and passion which echo history and the natural world. What is more, one message offered by The English Patient is that art, beauty, and love may emerge from the most incongruous sources. The real Count Lazlo de Almasy "was an intrepid explorer, but he was also a homosexual who wrote passionate letters to a young German officer he tried to help avoid going to the Russian front. He was also a monarchist" (Perlez C 17) who worked for Rommel. Ondaatje was aware that "the Count never had an affair with another man's wife" (Perlez C22). Furthermore, Minghella responded on CBS Sunday Morning to a question regarding "films that are being turned out now in Hollywood [having] a clear morality and . . . a neatly tied up ending" with the statement: "I never see in life any clarity. There is no moral clarity in life." Thus, Katharine tells Almasy that she hates "a lie" although she has just lied to her husband over the phone before their first wedding anniversary in order to be with her lover. Moreover, Almasy jots down several sentences before making love to Katharine during a Christmas party where Clifton plays Santa Claus to the sounds of "Silent Night" and "God Save the King": "Betrayals in war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace. New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything. For the heart is an organ of fire." And despite the wonders and vagaries of her affair, Katharine never denies her love for Clifton. In fact, she walks away from Almasy. Through this spirit of ambiguity, Michael Ondaatje concludes, "A book could be secret as a canoe trip, the making of a film more the voyage of Lord Jim's Patna-uncertain of ever reaching its destination with a thousand pilgrims on board and led by a morally dubious crew. But somehow magically it now and then got to a safe harbor" ("About Anthony Minghella's Screenplay" 19).

For in the end, if we allow ourselves to plunge into the uncharted flow of The English Patient, we may follow Minghella's hope "of shifting, of redefining an image and making [us] reconsider it from another point of view" (CBS Sunday Morning). As readers and viewers, we must also embrace, as the central characters do, the sweep of love that uncovers worlds and reveals dimensions across time, space, and history itself. Unquestionably, Ondaatje and Minghella ask a great deal of their audience. Nevertheless, the shared experience with this art promises illumination.

Douglas Stenberg

Works Cited

Chekhov, Anton. The Portable Chekhov. New York: The Viking Press, 1972.

Hatza, George. "`The English Patient' extraordinary romance." Reading Eagle/Reading Times 4 December 1996: A9.

Interview with Anthony Minghella. CBS Sunday Morning 9 March 1997.

Maslin, Janet. The Year's Memorable Films Paint the World in Light Hues and Dark." The New York Times 30 December 1996: C9.

McBride, Joseph. "The Patient Englishman." The Mr. Showbiz Interview, Anthony Minghella (1 of 4) 11 February 1997: www.mrshowbiz.com/features/interviews/plus/minghella.html.

Minghella, Anthony. "About The English Patient." The English Patient Press Kit. Miramax Films. Ondaatje, Michael. "About Anthony Minghella's Screenplay." The English Patient Press Kit. Miramax Films.

The English Patient. New York: Vintage International, 1992.

Perlez, Jane. "The Real Hungarian Count Was No `English Patient."' The New York Times 17 December 1996: C17.

Smith, Susan Bullington. "A Conversation With Anthony Minghella." Written By (March 1997).

"The Best Cinema of 1996." Time 23 December 1996: 72.

Copyright Literature/Film Quarterly 1998
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