The death of Anthony Minghella yesterday cut short the career of a gifted filmmaker who may have only begun to discover his own potential. Minghella's first movie, the 1991 Truly, Madly, Deeply, was small scale but struck deep in its emotional impact; a deserving cult hit, one could barely guess from its intimate charms that Minghella would, by the time of The English Patient, begin to demonstrate a rare contemporary mastery of epic filmmaking, bringing rich textures to the screen while skillfully deploying vast crews and across sprawling landscapes. One of Minghella's smallest and least-known projects is his two-aprt, fifteen-minute version of Samuel Beckett's Play (2000), Mighella's contribution to the multi-director, comprehensive "Beckett on Film": project. This bizarre, striking realization of the playwright's image-play about a man, his wife, and his mistress trapped together for eternity also serves as an intriguing footnote to the director's career for reuniting him with the stars of his first film, Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, and the female lead of his biggest hit, Kristen-Scott Thomas.
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