With 12 Oscar nominations, the film version of the novel "The English Patient" is a clear Hollywood favorite this year. But where the book is a solid example of the new literature of a world where borders are dissolving and identity is no longer tied to one place, the filmmakers have chosen to make a romance in the sand with the usual thoroughly European figures. PNS editor Andrew Lam is a short story writer and journalist who lives in San Francisco.

Hollywood's darling this year is "The English Patient," with 12 Oscar nominations. But the movie is, in many ways, only a monochrome version of a brilliant, multilayered novel by Michael Ondaatje.

The book, which won England's most prestigious prize (the Booker) belongs to a new genre of contemporary fiction. It could be called the literature of border-crossing as it describes a world where lives from different continents, different traditions, intersect.

The three-hour-long movie, on the other hand, is more or less romance in the sand redux.

Kip, a Sikh Indian soldier employed by the British government to clear mines, a minor character in the movie, plays a major and important part in the novel. He is the ultimate outsider, but he finds kinship with the English patient and falls in love with Hana, the nurse. In a sense, he is destined to inherit the English patient's wisdom and his borderless world.

The patient himself observes, "Kip and I are both international bastards -- born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives."

Indeed, the theme of displacement runs deep in the book. The patient, badly burned and nameless, turns out to be not English at all, but Hungarian and a count, a widely traveled and deeply intelligent map maker. In the end, he gives away his maps when confronted with a new, vast landscape that cannot be charted with compass and ruler, the landscape of the human heart.

Ondaatje intends to make him Kip's teacher, in a kind of role reversal of Rudyard Kipling's novel "Kim," so that "the young student was now Indian and the wise old teacher was English."

If Kipling was fascinated with India before the British Empire swallowed it whole, Ondaatje, in his turn, is fascinated with the British Empire before it unraveled. He shows us that the best observers of empire are not those at the center but those who, like Kip, were forced to make do on its edges but somehow managed to gain a front row seat.

Ondaatje -- born and raised in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and of Dutch, Sinhalese and Tamil blood -- is a transplanted soul, but he is not alone. He is one of a growing circle of transplanted writers who have produced some of the most compelling fiction of our time: Timothy Mo, V.S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Vithkram Seth, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, among others.

All these writers have, in one fashion or another, dwelled at the margins of the Commonwealth, migrated elsewhere, and having stolen the language of their colonial masters, as it were, use their fiction to investigate the arbitrary nature of the borders and the hybrid nature of human identity itself.

These are a universal themes, and themes that movies must draw on to convey our quickly shifting world.

But the idea of hybrid identity is not evident in the movie -- and it is a loss. Instead, the movie plays on one of the book's more straightforward narrative element, the romance of the English patient with the English woman. The romance is sultry enough, but it offers no improvement over Casablanca.

Fans of the new writing from these "international bastards" will find the movie disappointing. Ondaatje's novel gives the feeling of cultural heterogeneity. The movie uses that heterogeneity as an exotic backdrop to set off an otherwise very homogeneous romance.

Of late, Hollywood is beginning to tap into the past -- Jane Austen, Henry James, Shakespeare -- as well as borrowing from the imagination of contemporary writers. But it is our bad luck that film makers, evidently incapable of imagining complicated lives, insist on their own centrality -- The white man is in the middle of every movie -- rather than exploring the mismatched modern condition of humanity itself.

Of course, the world does not need to wait for Hollywood, nor is it captive to the vision that comes from Tinseltown, as it once was. All over the world, people are making movies -- Koreans are making movies and so are Mexicans and exiled Indians in Canada. And they are producing spectacular, on-the-edge visions that rival anything coming from Hollywood.

At one time, Hollywood beguiled the world. But an increasingly sophisticated global audience is demanding more and more to see some reflection of their own lives. Like it or not, Hollywood must decide whether it will move in this direction, or continue on its self-important course and miss the main event altogether.