The Lovers of the Arctic Circle
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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The cultural isolation of Americans has created numerous ridiculous shorthand notions of what constitutes a national cinema. Taiwanese cinema is one of the richest on the planet, but we’ve been stuck with only Ang Lee. Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou are just about our only guides to one-fifth of the world’s population, and the Kaurismaki brothers are relied on to define the Finnish soul (which they tend to do from A to B). Likewise, the relatively awful meanderings of Almodovar–less funny than John Waters and less artful than Rainer Werner Fassbinder, though teeming with somebody’s idea of hip fashion–have demarcated what we’re supposed to know about Spanish life in the 90s. It was bad enough when Luis Buñuel, a great director, had to serve as the only messenger from Franco’s Spain. But when Almodovar, along with Carlos Saura, was expected to deliver all the essentials of post-Franco Spain, it was almost easy to conclude that Spanish cinema no longer existed. Admittedly, Almodovar’s pranks had a certain party flavor, but his aesthetics were so threadbare and his sense of character so cartoonish and limp that the National Review’s John Simon wound up defending Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! only because its nastiness honored his own misogyny.
When Otto and Ana first meet, Ana’s father has just died in a car crash and Otto’s parents are separating. Ana initially perceives Otto as a sort of reincarnation of her father, and she brings about a meeting between her mother and his father, who soon become a couple. Otto and Ana are subsequently brought up as brother and sister, Otto living with his mother but visiting his father on weekends, but when they reach their teens they secretly become lovers.
We’re never told what the message is that Otto writes on all his paper gliders, which may be irritating to some viewers, just as the conundrums created by separate versions of events from the viewpoints of Otto and Ana may be frustrating. (For instance, Otto has a serious ski accident, with markedly different outcomes in each recounting of the event.) Variations on events are presented from the beginning, and not all of them correspond to the separate perceptions of Otto and Ana; early on Otto tells us how he met Ana by chasing a soccer ball out of the school yard, and then imagines what might have happened if the soccer ball hadn’t left the school yard. This favoring of the conditional tense is as radical in its implications as the conditional tenses of Marienbad, and as in Marienbad, the difficulty is that we don’t always know what’s conditional and what’s not.
