Lovers Of The Arctic Circle Details

More inspired than Sex and Lucia

I can recommend this film. The early scenes of how the lovers meet as eight years olds are most beautifully shot and, I found, stunning in the clarity with which they present the complex personalities of the young kids. No patronising view of what makes a child tick from Julio Medem - it’s full on. Appreciate the seemingly effortless way he presents the physiological dependencies of the young pair.

Beautiful but sometimes painful childhood leads into a sensual but even more painful adolescence. The lovers show decisiveness to bring their destinies together but the destructive forces of broken family betrayal and death combine to shake it all apart before the transition to adulthood.

Thus we are left with the crux of the matter, will they find the chance on the winds of fate to be together - for ever?

It’s not without sentimentality, but I forgive Medem that. Who knows how close we have been to fulfilling the biggest desires of our lives, but just failed to seize the chance that we sensed was close but invisible? Medem is toying with the "what if?" as if to say who really knows? You never really know. Equally, the overly symmetrical coincidences in the family stories that lead the lovers together did not trouble me. It served just to emphasise that sometimes we live in other dimensions that to us are more important than reality. This is the dimension that Julio Medem accesses with ease.

[Highly rated reviewer]

A typically fractured contrivance from Sr Medem

Julio Medem, who wrote and directed this film, studied psychiatry at medical school before dropping out to become a film critic and, eventually, a director. All of his films bear the hallmark of his education, but none of them are quite as profound as he seems to like to think.

Here he takes a boy and a girl, throws them randomly together, has them fall in love, and then shatters their relationship (and their lives, and the lives of their immediate families - except those who get as far away as possible, to Australia) before teasing his audience that there might still be a chance for a reconciliation. The key scene appears to be the one in the gift shop, played out in front of a baffled sales assistant, unsure whether she's watching young love or your actual incest. Once the balance, particularly in Otto's mind, is broken by his mother's sudden death, nothing can be the same again: flirting with fate brings its own revenge.

The film is either compelling and charming in its reflections on the whimsicality of fate and love, or thoroughly irritating in its switchback ride. I lean towards the former, but I'm not entirely convinced.