Julio Medem's brilliant films thrive on enigma, obfuscation, tease and irresolution. Lovers of the Arctic Circle is his most playful yet, because it seems his most lucid. There is the usual pattern of proliferating doubles, connection of motifs, bending of time; yet, rather than confuse or complicate like before, each separate entity seems thrusting towards the linear, Unified Whole of the conclusion, which is satisfying in an old-fashioned romantic way, until it too is irreversibly, indeterminately split.
The plot is Medem's simplest yet: two young children, Otto and Ana, are brought together by the affair between their parents which eventually grows into marriage. Otto continues to live with his mother, but increasing love for Ana causes him to move in with his dad so they can enjoy furtive lovemaking. Otto's mother, presumably ins reaction to a double abandonment, commits suicide; depressed, Otto tries to do likewise, fails, and leaves Ana and his family to become an air-messenger pilot. After a failed relationship with an old teacher, Ana goes to Lapland to live in a cabin owned by the father of her mother's new lover. A series of extraordinary coincidences seem to bring Ana back to Otto.
Anyone who has seen a Medem film (Lucia y el Sexo) will know what to expect: surface realistic observation is rejected in favour of an excessive formalism, artifice and patterning that allows access to greater emotional truths. The doubling is astonishing - male/female, mother/father, son/daughter, sister/brother, earth/air, North/South, death/rebirth, lost/found, concealment/revelation etc. Two halves should make one whole, but it never does in a Medem film, leading only to further fragmentation. The two main leads are played by three different actors each, leading to a triple splitting of self which is further underscored both by the permanency of the actors playing their parents, and by the different actors playing them slipping into the wrong time frame, e.g. the young Otto appearing in the adolescent Otto's plot.
Further dislocation occurs in the formal patterning of repetition and coincidence. The same scenes are repeated in different historical moments with different characters. The same events feature different protagonists, depending on the subjectivity of the teller. The main formal device is to have each lead tell in turn the story, but instead of clarifying, this only further confuses, because each sees differently from the other. Medem then undermines this obvious truth by showing a kind of innate bond between Otto and Ana: the palandromic fact of their names, the way each uses the other as a representation of a beloved dead parent etc. And yet again, THIS is denied in the film's most excruciating scene, where, years apart from each other, the two finally occupy the same space at a few feet's distance, on a cafe piazza, and fail to realise.
There is no such thing as a key to Medem, as his labyrinths are Theseus-proof, but the opening credits bear close scrutiny, revealing images of fragmentation - the crashed plane - and rupture, and an intimation of subjectivity that drives the film. Lovers of the Arctic Circle's ending suggests that it is Ana's striving for wholeness, after the ultimate dislocation - death. This reading, though, is questioned throughout - how, for instance, do we account for Otto's voiceover. We are forced to question how much of what we see is, if not literally plausible, than related. Most importantly, it makes us question the past, a history, and how it's told.
Medem's films, especially VACAS, are concerned with the difference between literal history, as told by the winners, and the messy, interior, emotional history of people as they live. VACAS featured a character named Peru, the name of Medem's son to whom TIERRA was dedicated, and who stars here as the young Otto. Lovers of the Arctic Circle is dedicated to Medem's father. The film is obsessed, like VACAS and, to a lesser extent, TIERRA, with family relationships, with tradition and continuity, with a saga that seem linear (generation follows generation) but is actually circular, as the past is continually replayed and distorted in the present.
A crucial subplot here is the meeting of Otto's grandfather with a Nazi bomber during the Guernica atrocity, an act that reverberates throughout the film, and touches, for good or ill, every character. The duality of the film is linked to the duality that split Spain apart throughout and after the Civil War. Another historical layer is linked to Medem's own work, as I outlined above, issues of continuity, which include style, cast, doubling, scenes (especially that of a photographer capturing his family), animals with supernatural powers, unresolved, or a proliferation of, endings; as well as discontinuities (e.g. for the first time, no Emma Suarez).
This is my lesser favourite Medem film, when compared to Lucia y el Sexo. It spends a little too much time in the air - its matrix of meaning is not as grounded in the blood and earth of his previous work. This is probably linked to the acting. In the earlier films the almost naturalistic truth of the actors clashed fertilely with the formal artifice. Here, the callow acting of the leads fails to achieve this, leaving one a little unsatisfied. The older stars are magnificent, though, especially Medem regular Nancho Novo, the loveliest man on film; his OWN abandonment is heartwrenching. There is also a great deal less comedy than previously, again, I fear, due to the acting. These are serious quibbles, but ultimately irrelevant - this is easily the best film around at the moment.
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