The Love That Remains – first-look review

When he speaks of his inspi­ra­tions, the Ice­landic film­mak­er Hlynur Pál­ma­son men­tions as many visu­al artists as movie direc­tors: in par­tic­u­lar, he has cit­ed the pho­tog­ra­ph­er Sal­ly Mann, who pho­tographed her fam­i­ly over the course of many years, and Mon­et, who paint­ed the water lilies in his own gar­den again and again. God­land, Hlynur’s pre­vi­ous fea­ture, was a his­tor­i­cal peri­od piece, about a Dan­ish priest on an errand into the 19^th-cen­tu­ry Ice­landic wilder­ness, that was praised for its rig­or­ous and mag­is­te­r­i­al for­mal­ism, in shots like the time-lapse mon­tage of a horse decom­pos­ing across a year, in all kinds of light and in all kinds of weath­er; the horse was Hlynur’s father’s, and he would pho­to­graph it every day on the way home from drop­ping the kids off at school, part of an artis­tic prac­tice that is delib­er­ate­ly inter­wo­ven with his every­day life.

His new film, The Love That Remains, is osten­si­bly a slice-of-life dram­e­dy about a very Ice­landic fam­i­ly: mom Anna (Saga Garðars­dót­tir) and dad Mag­nus (Sver­rir Guð­na­son) are sep­a­rat­ed, but he comes over for din­ner and stays late into the mid­sum­mer white nights to play bas­ket­ball with the kids. But more than a par­tic­u­lar nar­ra­tive, the film is an attempt to, as Hlynur has described, ​“work with what sur­rounds me,” and to allow the raw mate­ri­als of fam­i­ly and land­scape to unfold over time in a process that might be called ​“slow film­mak­ing” (as opposed to ​“slow cin­e­ma”; he gen­er­al­ly has sev­er­al projects on the boil at once, each tak­ing mul­ti­ple years to finish). 

Anna and Maggi’s chil­dren are played by Hlynur’s own chil­dren, twin sons Grí­mur and Þorgils and teen daugh­ter Ida, who is more mature and moody than she was in her sup­port­ing role in God­land just a cou­ple years ago. The fam­i­ly hike and gath­er blue­ber­ries and mush­rooms near Hlynur’s real fam­i­ly home in the shad­ow of the glac­i­er Vat­na­jökull; fish­er­man Mag­gi goes out to see to reel in the her­ring nets;on a fen­ce­post over­look­ing the North Atlantic; the kids rig up a dum­my, a knight in armor, on a fen­ce­post, and shoot at it with a bow and arrows. Hlynur films it from the same angle in every time of year and in every kind of weath­er: rain, snow, wind, mud, end­less sum­mer nights and dark icy win­ters. Time flows on in mon­tages of still images and tableaux, par­tic­u­lar­ly close-ups of the chil­dren pos­ing for the cam­era, which, espe­cial­ly when accom­pa­nied by Har­ry Hunt’s gen­tle piano score, seem like pho­tos in a fam­i­ly album. And the sea­sons, they go round and round…

Anna is an artist whose work, like Hlynur’s, is time-based: she cov­ers large can­vas­es in abstract met­al shapes and leaves them out­doors in a field for months, let­ting the met­al rust and the rust trans­fer to the can­vas­es in unpre­dictable ways. This is also the method by which the emi­nent Ice­landic sculp­tor Jóhann Eyfells made his majes­tic sculp­ture-on-can­vas ​“Cloth Col­lap­sion”; The Love That Remains is filled with visu­al echoes, delib­er­ate or oth­er­wise, of con­tem­po­rary Ice­landic visu­al art, includ­ing Ola­fur Eliasson’s pho­to series Cars in Rivers and the over­head views of moss, grass and wild­flow­ers, bor­der­ing on abstrac­tion, of Eggert Péturs­son.

At the out­set of her career, Saga was a standup com­ic whose act was built on her goofy, wind­milling stage pres­ence and edgy hang­ing-with-the-boys quips; here, in lith­some ear­ly mid­dle age, she’s strik­ing­ly grown-up and wind-whipped as she con­sid­ers roman­tic inde­pen­dence and artis­tic frus­tra­tion (includ­ing a mean-spir­it­ed and very fun­ny inter­lude in which a pre­ten­tious Swedish gal­lerist vis­its, talks non­sense at her non­stop, and then declines to rep­re­sent her). It’s a wist­ful cen­tral per­for­mance in a film that sketch­es out the easy rhythms of fam­i­ly life (and fea­tures the Ice­landic sheep­dog Pan­da in a scene-steal­ing turn as her­self), but though ground­ed in the domes­tic, verisimil­i­tude is not the film’s pri­ma­ry concern. 

Hlynur’s scripts, orga­nized around stark ele­men­tal oppo­si­tions and broad the­mat­ic strokes, have the feel­ing of being com­posed more than writ­ten; strik­ing vignettes illus­trat­ing the push-pull of old lust, or the bur­geon­ing rift between a par­ent and a child, unfold in frozen ges­tures more­so than as dra­mat­ic chore­og­ra­phy; the film arranges elab­o­rate visu­al con­cepts to demon­strate vio­lent chance, earthy sen­su­al­i­ty, and espe­cial­ly patri­ar­chal self-fla­gel­la­tion. Maggi’s direc­tion­less out­side the nuclear fam­i­ly is here ren­dered lit­er­al­ly with a strik­ing shot of Sver­rir float­ing on his back in the ocean, buf­fet­ed by the tides with a set­ting sun in the far dis­tance. The Love That Remains becomes increas­ing­ly sur­re­al as it goes, with Hlynur’s cast act­ing out slap­stick sight gags and dream sequences inspired by B‑movies and Bergman. The movie corkscrews along until it final­ly just ends — but Hlynur’s life, and the lives of his chil­dren and the nat­ur­al world that sur­rounds them, continue.