Saw Map of the Human Heart, a strange twisty film. Based on the title I was not going in with high hopes, but the film surprised me. It followed a half-white-half-Inuit boy who was taken from his tribe by an English cartographer to Canada in order to treat his (the boy's) tuberculosis. There the boy falls in some kind of pre-pubescent love with a half-indian girl. She has a heart condition and he steals her chest x-rays. The film is using unusual symbols here but the meaning, I think, is clear. From there we flash forward in time and spend most of the rest of the film on a love triangle between the protagonist, the girl, and the English cartographer.
The film had a strange, clumsy quality to it. Things just seemed to happen. The acting was flat and weirdly delicate. The film's symbols are laid out but not connected in a way I understood. We see many maps, anatomical diagrams, and that chest x-ray, folded like a butterfly. The characters struggle with societal and internal racism, their relationship colored by the girl's ability to pass for white and the protagonist's inability to do so. Lots going on. I think I may have missed some of the point of this film. At one point we see the cartographer's office. There's a manikin in a cupboard covered with maps. This suggests a far more whimsical or sinister film. Very strange.
The film comes off as kind of clumsy, like a made-for-TV movie. Everything is kind of obviously shown to us. A cruel nun is introduced shrilly teaching about hell, the protagonist boy is introduced giggling and smiling. Later the film becomes surprisingly complex, interweaving heavy concepts of race and identity and nationalism with a knotty plot that keeps unfolding. There's film-poetry flights of fancy and that weird acting.
I don't know what to make of this film. It was certainly unlike most other films I've seen but I don't know that I liked it. Very inconsistent but maybe worth a look. A rare curiosity.
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