Maps are hardly promising material for movie adaptations, representing only the surface of things with no attempt to reveal their character or real flavour. You read the lines of a map, not between them.

New Zealand director Vincent Ward's latest film spans a lot of territory, from the Arctic to Canada to England to Germany, with a plot so clichéd you won't need a map to tell you where the characters are all going to end up, yet it succeeds in a very uncartographic manner, with a visual flair that seeks to transform the obvious and reveal beauty beneath the surface.

So it is that the picture the hero treasures of his beloved is an X-Ray of her chest. Everywhere Ward seeks out symbol and visual metaphor, and reinterprets the world with hallucinatory flair.

Which is just as well, because his script, intended as a treatise on desire, leaves a lot to be desired. Inter-racial love stories are increasingly common as film-making subjects but Map Of The Human Heart boasts one a little more complicated than most, between Albertine, a half-caste French Canadian-Native American and Avik, an Inuit eskimo (also, but less obviously, half-caste). They meet as children in a Catholic hospital, and it is these scenes and in particular the delightful performances of the child actors that really seduce the audience.

Parted by nuns fearing for their souls, their paths criss-cross over the years, heavily dependent on coincidence and a Barbara Cartlandish approach to world events. To add to the flavour of international confusion, Irish actor Patrick Bergin is cast as an English map-maker who both brings them together and comes between them.

Ward's dialogue is sometimes deeply risible, never more than when he is signalling his metaphors. "Women are a map. You've got to understand their longitude and how much latitude you can take," Bergin tells Jason Scott Lee as the adult Avik. Quite. And life's a map, so get a compass.

His handling of the actors is uneven, and the events of their lives are strung together in a disconcertingly disjointed fashion before culminating in a laughably overlong pulp romantic epilogue.

But never mind the content, feel the width! Ward uses the widescreen format like a master and you will stay with the film for the sheer visual splendour he reveals in the margins of his story. an apocalyptic fire becomes a tableau of extraordinary colour and intimate pain; Second World War bombing missions are depicted with terrible gorgeousness; a couple make love on a blooming barrage balloon; whales and caribou are caught scattering in swooping aerial shots.

Map Of The Human Heart is an attempt to reveal the world through the eyes of desire. It strains towards the epic and throws up enough that is strikingly evocative for the viewer to stay with it, even though, by the time he gets to the overstretched end, the director has patently lost his way.

RATING: * * * *