Colours shape director's Map

MAP OF THE HUMAN HEART, with Jason Scott Lee, Anne Parillaud and Patrick Bergin. Directed by Vincent Ward. Category II. Showing at Silvercord and Windsor.

VINCENT Ward is hardly the prolific type. His last film, released in 1988, was The Navigator, made following a four-year hiatus after his debut. It was a very beautiful and strange film - qualities which, five years later, he has carried over to Map of theHuman Heart, though not quite to such spellbinding effect.

Ward is a visualist, and everything else in his work is subservient to the striking image. He works with a strictly limited palette of colours aimed at evoking a mood, and most of the images chosen appear to have been so because the colours fit.

Here the predominant colour is white, the subsidiaries blue and grey. The symbolic connotations of white are so varied that they cover virtually everything, and there's little joy to be had from trying to read the film that way.

It only really makes any sense at all if you accept the colour choices come first - for whatever reason - that they dictated the images and those in turn composed his story.

Beyond or beneath these signature colours there is a second set of visual images at play. The geographical map and aerial landscape photo, the anatomical diagram and human x-ray (as suggested by the intriguing title) are recurring motifs, often mixed up, as in a mannequin illustrating the human physiognomy - a road map of blood red veins and arteries, marbling a pristine white surface.