2-> 1: A Math Made in Heaven

Lovers of the Arctic Circle, the newest feature from Spanish writer and director Julio Medem, should come with some sort of a warning label. For those of us humanities majors who thought that after passing the QRR we would never have to take another math class again, Medem's romantic saga can come as something of a shock. Who would have thought that all those old logical tools left behind in high school calculus class would come back to haunt us in a movie theater?

Perhaps I'm exaggerating. Lovers of the Arctic Circle is not.

Heck, it's not even I.Q. It doesn't so much as mention math in the course of two hours. In fact, it often feels more like a treatise on philosophy than mathematics, an exploration of the role that fate and free will play in our lives a sort of Milan Kundera novel put on film.

But still, Medem's tightly crafted plot and interlacing narratives fit together like the proof of a logical theorem. His characters move like points on a coordinate plane, and when the movie is complete you can see the curve of the actions that they left trailing behind them. Perhaps whats most surprising is that all of this happens in the context of a love story.

Lovers of the Arctic Circle is not just any love story, though. Otto (Fele Martinez) and Ana (Najwa Nimri), the story's star-crossed protagonists, are step siblings. They meet by chance as children one day after school and there is an immediate attraction. Within a year, Otto's father has left his mother to marry Anas widowed mother. When he reaches puberty, Otto chooses to live with his father so that he and Ana can become lovers. Needless to say, this is a decision that changes Otto's life forever. His mother is crushed by his desertion of her. Overwhelmed by guilt, Otto suddenly leaves Ana and his step-family.

But he cannot get Ana out of his mind. Years pass, but Otto and Ana, like two pieces of an equation, cannot forget one another.

Eventually, they reunite after a long and complicated search that takesthem from their native Spain all the way to (I kid you not) northern Finland above the Arctic Circle where the sun never sets in the spring.

As though his plot were not off-kilter enough, Medem feels the need to smother his story in coincidences and near-misses. Otto and Ana's first meeting, their parent's decision to marry, the manner in which they learn of each other's whereabouts after years of separation (Ana just happens to decide she should live in Finland and Otto just happens to take a job flying packages between Spain and the Arctic Circle)--all of these increasingly unlikely events are consciously presented as a chain of coincidences. At the same time, Otto and Ana's love is not simply a product of chance. There is an overriding destiny that brings them together, that makes their lives come literally full circle despite several flirtations with disaster attempted suicides, running away from home, the draw of other lovers. There is never really any doubt that Otto and Ana will find each other in the end. The question is what sequence of incidents will bring them together.

The danger in making any film as intricate as Lovers of the Arctic Circle is that it can become overwhelming, not just for the audience but for the filmmakers as well. Indeed, Medem's piece often feels uneven.

Some of the coincidences he presents are so unlikely as to be laughable, and much of his symbolism (the fact that both Otto and Ana's names are palindromes, the attraction of a land where the sun never sets) goes unresolved the audience knows that these elements are supposed to be revealing of something but they are too underdeveloped to truly say anything. Medem simply has too much going on in his script to tie all the pieces together, to link all of the interesting elements he presents into a thematically unified whole.

What saves the movie is the sheer earnestness of everyone involved. Najwa Nimri and Fele Martinez are captivating as Medem's quasi-incestuous lovers. There's both a passion and an intelligence to their personalities that suits the movie well. They seem to be at once constantly contemplating the strange pull of fate that directs their lives and rebelling against it, trying to make room for emotions in the coldly mathematical world that Medem creates. Medem himself as both writer and director shares this passion and intelligence. Lovers of the Arctic Circle could very easily come across as a pretentious intellectual attack on our beliefs about emotion and free will. But Medem doesn't frame his work as an attack so much as he poses it as a question. What if even the most intimate aspects of our lives were nothing but a mathematical sequence of events?, he asks. How would the knowledge of this affect the way we live?

The question is an important one, and Medem's answer is thoughtful.

Even if it is mathematical, he says, passion is still strong enough to give meaning to our lives.