Julio Medem’s
Lovers
of the Arctic Circle / Los amantes del Circulo Polar
"Can
you run back? A few hours back, a life back?"
Medem’s
feature films (director and writer):
Cows
/ Vacas (1991)
Red
Squirrel / La Ardilla Roja (1993)
Tierra (1996)
Lovers
of the Arctic Circle (1998)
Sex
and Lucia / Lucia y el Sexo (2002)
Medem’s
five films have been greeted with critical acclaim within some circles,
although even his latest films have failed to secure general release outside of
Spain (Medem is Basque) and are often not so much as reviewed. This is not
surprising, quite apart from the dominance of Hollywood product. Medem’s films eschew
conventional plot development, with the ‘unreal’ often intruding, and the ‘end’
being undecided (Vacas, Lovers). The narratives are spliced,
looped, variegated; sometimes a story-line literary disappears down a hole (Sex and Lucia); sometimes, a narrative
ends where it began (Lovers); sometimes,
images from distinct lines of plot interweave fugue-like (the speeding cars of Red Squirrel);
every time, the screen teems with detail, motif and resonance. The films have ephemeral
loci of perspective which compete (the sledge scene of Lovers, the dog attack in Sex
and Lucia, the women of Tierra). Yet
the ‘action’ is observed, framed - mutely, without sagacity or irony (the
eponymous cows of Vacas, the unobserved
squirrel of Red Squirrel, the rain-deer
in Lovers). Medem’s films are cerebral
then. They are also a unique joy, full of wit, romance, eroticism and intrigue.
All of them are beautifully shot - there is simply not one uninteresting frame
in Lovers. Medem also possesses a
lightness of touch reminiscent of Buñnel. Comedy is part of Medem’s
metaphysics.
So much said, it is tempting to see Medem’s
work as post-modern, a reaction to the static interiority of the compositions
of, say, Antonioni or Tarkovsky; a style predicated on a philosophy of the
essential unity and separateness of consciousness. Such a contrast does hold,
but things are not so simple. Medem’s art is not merely playful. Medem’s films
are metaphysical parables, often on the nature of love, and the concomitant
psychology of identity, necessity and contingency. For Medem, love is the interior
escape from apparent objective contingency; that is, to be in love is to view
the loved as internally related to one’s self, and thus inexplicable, primitive.
(In a number of the films, including Lovers,
this is contrasted with familial love.) Medem’s world remains brutally
physical, contingent, coincidental. It is precisely through the points of accidental
intersection, however, that the lovers feel themselves fated.
Medem is often compared to Kieslowski. Blue and The Double Life of Veronique certainly recapitulate Medems’s themes,
and the work of both is, at its best, visually stunning. But whereas Kieslowski
is pictorially overweening, always self-conscious of his effects, as we are obliged
to ponder the stasis of the mise-en-scène
or the petrified visage of Binochet, just as Antonioni had earlier invited us
to look upon Vitti, Medem is all editing, one may say. Each scene is an eddy
within a flow of currents, a point of harmony as melodies momentarily intersect.
Medem has much of Powell and Buñnel in him.
Some
things to note
Lovers
is constructed as a loop, with Otto and Anna - the two principal protagonists -
telling the ‘same’ story as internal loops. Each story is a set of
coincidences, events which have their doubles in the past and reflections in
the present. The stories themselves coincide at the ‘end’, reflected in the
loops of Anna’s eyes under the loop of the midnight sun.
Symmetry
dominates, from palindromic names, to doubled names, to doubled events, to
facing identical schools, to the interior of cars, to the death of a mother and
the death of a father, to the camera tracking left-right, right-left,…
There
are two central motifs in the film: fuel gauges indicating ‘empty’ and
near-misses, involving cars and busses, people, trees, sledges, planes, etc.
There a number of secondary motifs, involving rain-deer, notes, the bombing of
Guernica, photographs, etc. There are many recurring images: eyes, windows,
holes, lenses, reflections, etc.
There
are a number of inconsistencies between Otto and Anna’s stories, most evident
of which is the sledge-ride. They also arise in what people say, photographs,
etc.
What
is written on Otto’s paper airplane?
P.S.
In 1996, Medem was invited by Speilberg to direct The Mask of Zoro. He declined.