Los Amantes del Círculo Polar

There are films I like.

There are films I recommend.

And then there are a few films that, at least for a while, become something more personal.

Los Amantes del Círculo Polar was one of those films for me.

When I wrote about it in 2009, I called it:

the most beautiful film I had ever seen.

That is a dangerous sentence.

Years pass.

You watch hundreds of other films.

Your taste changes.

You change.

But I still understand why I wrote it.

The film tells the story of Ana and Otto.

Two children meet.

Their families become connected.

They grow up together.

They fall in love.

They separate.

They search for each other.

And throughout the film, coincidences keep bringing their lives close together.

Sometimes very close.

Almost close enough.

That word is important.

Almost.

A great part of the film lives inside that word.

They almost meet.

They almost understand.

They almost arrive at the right moment.

They almost say what needs to be said.

Their lives keep moving in circles around each other.

That is probably why the title fits the story so well.

The Arctic Circle is a real place, but in the film it also feels like the destination of all these coincidences.

A place where the circle might finally close.

A place where all the separate roads might become one road.

The film made me think about something I had probably already felt but had never really put into words:

Sometimes the most important thing in life is not who you meet.

It is when you meet them.

Timing can change everything.

You can meet the right person at the wrong moment.

You can understand something years too late.

You can spend months waiting for something that happens five minutes after you leave.

You can be physically very close to somebody and still miss them completely.

That idea frightened me.

It still does.

We like to imagine that important relationships are protected by some kind of invisible force.

If two people are supposed to find each other, they will.

If something is meant to happen, somehow it will happen.

It is a comforting thought.

Los Amantes del Círculo Polar makes that thought beautiful.

But it also makes it dangerous.

Because coincidence can bring two people together.

It cannot make them speak.

It cannot make them stay.

It cannot make them understand each other.

It cannot guarantee that they will look in the right direction at the right moment.

That part still belongs to us.

One of the things I loved about the film was the way the same events are seen from different perspectives.

Ana remembers something one way.

Otto remembers it another way.

The event is the same.

The meaning is different.

I think this happens much more often in real life than we realize.

Two people can live through exactly the same afternoon and remember completely different things about it.

One remembers a sentence.

The other remembers the silence after it.

One remembers being happy.

The other remembers being afraid.

One thinks something important began that day.

The other thinks that was the day it ended.

And both can be telling the truth.

Memory is strange like that.

We do not store our lives like a camera.

We rewrite them every time we remember them.

Perhaps that is why old relationships become almost fictional after enough time has passed.

We remember a person.

Then we remember ourselves remembering that person.

Eventually, it becomes difficult to separate what really happened from the story we have been telling ourselves for years.

The film understands this.

It is not simply about love.

It is about memory.

Distance.

Coincidence.

And the strange stories we build around the things that happen to us.

Even the names feel like part of the game.

Ana.

Otto.

Names that can be read in both directions.

Palindromes.

Beginning and ending becoming the same thing.

Again, the circle.

Everything in the film seems to return.

People return.

Places return.

Memories return.

But returning is not the same as going back.

That is another thing the film quietly teaches.

You can return to a city.

You can find someone again.

You can visit a place from your childhood.

You can hear an old song.

But you cannot return as the same person who left.

Time has already changed the meaning of the place.

And it has changed you.

Maybe this is one of the reasons I was so affected by the film.

At that time in my life, I probably still believed more strongly in the possibility of returning.

Returning to people.

Returning to moments.

Fixing something simply by finding it again.

The older I get, the more complicated that idea seems.

Sometimes finding something again is wonderful.

Sometimes it only shows you how much time has passed.

There is one other thing about the film that stayed with me:

its sadness is not loud.

There is no simple villain.

Nobody wakes up every morning planning to destroy somebody else’s life.

Instead, things go wrong because people are human.

They hesitate.

They misunderstand.

They leave.

They wait.

They choose another road.

They arrive too late.

That kind of tragedy feels much closer to real life.

Most of the important things we lose are not stolen from us by villains.

They disappear quietly.

A friendship is not maintained.

A phone call is postponed.

A sentence is never said.

Someone moves away.

Years pass.

Then one day we realize that the opportunity no longer exists.

Perhaps this is why the film affected me more than ordinary romantic films.

It does not say:

Love conquers everything.

It says something much less comforting.

Love can be real.

And still not be enough.

You also need timing.

Courage.

Attention.

Communication.

And sometimes luck.

That is a frightening combination.

But there is something beautiful about it too.

Because if life really is full of coincidences, then every ordinary day contains possibilities we cannot yet see.

A person sitting near us.

A train we almost missed.

A film somebody recommends.

A message we almost did not answer.

A decision that seems completely unimportant at the time.

Years later, one of these things may become the beginning of an entire story.

I first watched Los Amantes del Círculo Polar because somebody introduced me to it.

At the time, I could not know that years later I would still remember the film.

I certainly could not know that I would once describe it as the most beautiful film I had ever seen.

That is another small coincidence.

And perhaps that is the best way to remember the film.

We spend so much time looking for the big moments that change our lives.

But sometimes everything begins with something very small.

Someone says:

“You should watch this film.”

And a few hours later, the world feels slightly different.

Maybe life really does move in circles.

The problem is that while we are inside them, they usually look like straight lines.