Cinema: Never mind the hype, prepare to be seduced

As Count Laszlo de Almasy, the Hungarian explorer of North Africa incorrectly identified by his doctors as English in The English Patient (15), Ralph Fiennes has a lean and hungry look; more exactly, a Lean and hungry look, since his character is manifestly a spiritual brother of the celluloid TE Lawrence - scholar, ascetic, neurotic - and Anthony Minghella's film offers the most gorgeous, enraptured visions of the desert the cinema has seen since David Lean's epic. (Fiennes, of course, has already had a direct stab at TEL in the made-for-TV movie A Dangerous Man).

We first encounter Almasy in an aerial-process shot, flying a small plane over dunes with surfaces as sleek and glamorous as the curves of the woman who is his silent passenger, Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). It's a part-erotic, part-mystical idyll violently interrupted by Nazi artillery, which sends their craft crashing down in flames. The film is barely past its opening credits, and you already have a fair measure of its powers of seduction. It's going to be Lawrence of Arabia with snogging.

And even if you are the kind of desert-loving Englishman who prefers to sate his hunger for desolate places without having to sit through a lot of girlie nonsense about love, the ride is smooth and often fascinating. The English Patient retells some of the old stories movies have always liked to tell - about the hard, lonely man melted by passion; about the glacial beauty with an incandescent heart who forsakes her husband for this brooding solitary; about ardours which end in death and noble self- sacrifice - and that is what should help make it a popular hit. The Savile Row suits, blindingly white frocks and Tuscan scenery won't hurt the box office, either.

Yet it also tells stories that aren't so familiar, and strikes notes Hollywood seldom permits. Its heart may be on its sleeve, but so is its brain: while it's a tear-jerker, it's a tear-jerker that has taken on board lessons from modernism, entwining its various strands into something that amounts to more than the sum of its plots.

Michael Ondaatje's novel refers to Ezra Pound's imprisonment at Pisa, and both the film and the book have Poundian tics, including the urge to make strange bedfellows of forgotten works of art. One of its most haunting and cryptic scenes is the discovery of a cave deep in the Sahara: explorers' torches light up ancient rock-paintings of human figures. This moment is thematically rhymed with a touch of quirky romance elsewhere in the film, in which a young soldier takes his girlfriend to a chapel, trusses her up in ropes, hands her a flare and hoists her up so that she can examine some early Renaissance frescos. (A cheap date, but it works.)

Another Poundian element is the homage to Herodotus. Almasy, so disfigured after his plane crash that he could double for a Roswell autopsy, keeps a copy of the Father of History by his sickbed, and in his painful upper- crust wheeze asks his nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) to read to him from it. Lulled by classical prose and morphine, his mind shuttles between his adventures in North Africa before and during the war, and his present condition, dying of burns in an abandoned Tuscan mansion whose other tenants are a sinister Canadian, real name Caravaggio, code-name Moose (Willem Dafoe), and Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh officer in the British army, engaged in bomb disposal - there is an agonisingly tense sequence in which he tries to take apart a detonator - as VE day approaches.

Almasy's story, reliving passages between the moment when he first sets eyes on Katherine Clifton - an aristocratic English rose come to waste her perfume on the desert air - and the terrible outcome of their adulterous affair, intersects with or finds echoes in the stories of the other tenants. Hana fears that she is cursed, and brings death to everyone she loves. Caravaggio/ Moose believes that Almasy is a German spy, has murdered the Cliftons, and was indirectly responsible for his being captured, tortured and mutilated by the German army after Tobruk (this is one of the film's few all-out action sequences, and it's great stuff, packed to the seams with burning ships and a blizzard of parachutes). Kip loses his beloved assistant to a booby-trapped statue, falls in love with Hana but has to leave her. Each of the five main actors is exquisite after his or her own fashion, though the surprising performance belongs to Mlle Binoche, who rings fresh and true as a representative of the Life Force. It's largely thanks to her that the final crescendo of uplift doesn't feel tacked-on or forced.

Viewers who enjoyed sobbing their way along to Truly, Madly, Deeply might perhaps find these stories less affecting than Minghella's earlier work, albeit considerably more erotic: the matter-of-fact way in which he films Katherine shedding her dress and climbing into a bath behind Almasy is so unstagily carnal that it feels almost scandalous, and though he shows little more than the lovers' faces when they copulate upright and fully clothed on the margins of a Christmas party in Cairo, their clinch is hotter in every sense than the bedroom frolics in, say, a Rebecca De Mornay flick. Minghella ends the coupling with a cruel joke: Katherine's husband finds his wife panting and discomposed, sniffs at her, asks "What do you smell of?" and answers himself "Marzipan". Never heard it called that before.

After such blazes of yearning, the film's tragic passages seem relatively cerebral, and it's possible to leave the film more caught up in its intricate pattern of details than churned up by its operatic climaxes. Minghella, who wrote as well as directed, has taken his share of liberties with Ondaatje's work (the author licensed them); but for all that, his achievement here is to have contrived a film which is truly and deeply cinematic, if not madly so, yet which has the density of the best prose fictions. The one thing which keeps it from being a classic date movie is that it offers so many unexpected images and notions that you might end up neglecting your date.