Lovers Of The Arctic Circle

A M A Z I N G
Am I glad I decided to rent this movie! Like the theme of this movie, it was a good twist of fate that I got it.

I don't know how to put the brilliance of this movie into words. In the vein of "Pulp Fiction", "Run Lola Run", and "Before the Rain", "Lovers of the Arctic Circle" is a complex movie that dares to defy conventions of storytelling--using multi-perspectives, circular storylines, coincidences. This is not for everyone, since some people just like their stories to be flung onto their plates, challenges aside.

The story penetrates into the psyche by not telling it through one person's eyes--but both--the two lovers, Ana and Otto. This method of storytelling heightens our perspectives and increases the depth of emotion and thought. The story tells how Ana and Otto fall in love as children, and how their love only grows stronger throughout the years, despite trials and tribulations. Both perspectives weave in and out, combine once--and...

You know anything that lasts forever?
That's what young Otto's father asks him in Julio Medem's Los Amantes del Circulo Polar, and quite frankly, something I'd like to ask all of you. The two were having a conversation on one of the philosophical aspects of life. "Everything needs to be cyclic. Everything begins and ends." "That's life," according to the father. "Happy and sad. Everything expires over time."

The story concerns Otto and Ana, two children who met when they were eight, and whose lives become entwined further when Otto's father and Ana's mother marry. However, the beginning shows Otto as a pilot delivering long distance air-mail and flashes back and forth to his childhood and adolescent years. As for Ana, we hear her voice over a cinematically beautiful scene of a lake reflecting the salmon-coloured sky, as if it were a lake of pink lemonade, the sun dipping down lower until looping back up in time-lapse photography. She says she could tell the story of her life...

Best movie of it's type
I happened to catch this one on TV one night and was so impressed and intrigued by it's content that I have purchased it... After reading the reviews of other's, I find no one has addressed what I feel this movie is so beautifully portraying. Not only is it a wonderful and moving love story, it is also what I call a "Bardo" story. The best one yet in my opinion. To me it shows what happens at death (at least from the viewpoint of the one who has died), depicted in this movie as if nothing much really happens but the life we believe we are in continues with only some minor changes. In this movie the two main characters, Ana and Otto, actually die several times. The way the movie unfolds it appears as only a bright flash of light and then their apparent journey in this world continues. Not so apparent until the end is that they have both gone into the "bardo" and in fact perhaps we are all in the "bardo". If anyone else was aware of this I would love to hear from them. The...

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