Out for the Count

Rating: 10/10 (16 May 2006)

Anthony Minghella's (1996) film of Michael Ondaatje's novel which was first published in 1992 is set in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War.
It spans the course of the war and the way it both disrupts and facilitates the haphazard relationships and experiences of the characters whose lives we follow as the story unfolds.
It portrays the operation of many confused and troubled minds and like all war films tracks the discomforting effects of sudden and unpredictable life-changing events. But equally, it traces the erratic and unexpected efforts of the different characters to find small interludes of peace in the shattering and unhinging progress of the war as it moves incomprehensibly towards a conclusion.
In writing the book, the author came to the story much as the viewer comes to the film. A little confused and not quite understanding what is going on. At all stages of the film, things happen which are unexpected and sudden, but whose effect is predictable and far-reaching.
But this cannot be the life of the author himself - because he was not born until after the war, of which he writes, was over.
And somehow this is the feeling that the film conveys. Rather like recollections from an actual childhood, which later come into focus the film takes us on an incredible journey which is overshadowed by the awakening recollections of the troubled individual from which it takes its title.
This a great film that takes us into a dangerous, unbalanced world where ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances struggle to make sense of their shattered lives and to find something familiar in their unfamliar surroundings.