Watching Julio Medem's complex mind-game, "Lovers of the Arctic Circle", it's hard to argue that words like "haunting", "mystical", "lyrical" and "beautiful" were invented in order to describe it. What other words can possibly describe a film whose recurring motifs are paper aeroplanes flying wildly into the air and pilots falling out of the sky? Add a few more words like "mysterious", "breathtaking", "astounding", and you get a sense of where this review is going.

Few filmmakers attempt films like this. I recall the similarly-themed "Map of the Human Heart" (in fact, the two films' titles seem interchangeable, given the contents of both films) which I found perplexing, disjointed, unfulfilling and disappointing. Where does Lovers succeed where Heart failed?

It cannot be in the slight but incredibly convoluted story presented here. A young Spanish boy Otto - named for a Nazi pilot that his grandfather rescued - is given to fits of passion. One day, he scribbles a question - the eternal question, his father says - on dozens of paper aeroplanes and flies them into the air. His classmates who pick up the missive laugh and giggle, saying it is corny, silly, but Ana, a young girl from the neighboring school picks one up and refuses to believe that a boy could ask so sensitive a question. Through a series of coincidences (and there are tonnes of them in this film), Otto and Ana end up as step-siblings who fall madly in love. But fate deals them blow after blow, and the film traverses several continents (including Australia, and Europe) before landing ultimately in Finland, where the arctic circle becomes the site of their closure. Along the way, family histories intersect and entwine, and more than five sets of couples come into play as Otto and Ana try to work out their tortured love.

In an early monologue in the film, it is explained that Otto and Ana are palindromic names, where the beginning and the end are one and the same. So it is with Medem's film, which starts and ends in exactly the same way, with some of the most astonishing visuals ever put on film. Hyper-romantic to the point of almost becoming ridiculous, Medem expertly steers his film clear of tawdry waters and instead carefully toes the fine line between tragedy and farce. Though his lovers face seemingly insurmountable odds continuously, their situations never seem hackneyed or unbelievable. His unhappy protagonists struggle against fate, and it is the nature of love and fate that Medem brings to the forefront in his meditation of relationships - that two lovers could so powerfully move the forces around them, to will their fates into existence, is Medem's most preposterous, and his most poetic, claim.

His cast, led by the exotically alluring Najwa Nimri and the pixie-like Fele Martinez, all perform well. In Medem's elaborate set-up, they are mere pawns to his vision, much as Otto and Ana's families are mere pawns to their destinies. With her hypnotic gaze and his hooded features, Nimri and Martinez both bring a sense of displacement to the proceedings - as realized in their performances, it becomes crystal clear that neither Otto nor Ana truly belong in the real world, which is why they must escape to the outermost limits of the earth, to where day and night become blurred into one continuoum, where a circle of frozen time and tumultuous emotions can co-mingle, in order to realize their past, present and future together.

It is rare that a film like this is comes along. What makes this so precious is how it succeeds in what it attempts - a meditative thesis on the nature of love and destiny, disguised as an overblown love story. Add another word to the list of superlatives I've already heaped on this film - "treasure".

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