Julio Médem's Lovers of the Arctic Circle is an oneiric phantasm, a poetic fever dream of forbidden love more Möbius strip than movie. Charting the life-long love affair between step-siblings Otto and Ana, the film swirls and sways as it charts the disparate coincidences, cosmic chances, and karmic phenomena that seem to pull them apart and bring them back together. This is a film of cyclical images and actions--airplanes, both paper and real; car crashes; palindromic names--as well as memories that are repeated from the viewpoints of conflicting observers, such as a ski accident that's remembered differently by Ana and Otto. Curiously, the film doesn't try to decode which of these recollections is the right one because neither can be truly "right" in the eyes of a film that sees memory and reality as equally malleable and plastic. But at its heart, the film is a romantic melodrama, something that my (admittedly cursory) glance at then-contemporary critical appraisals seemed to miss. It's gorgeous, haunting, more than a bit perverted, and maddening.
Rating: 9/10
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