THE LOVE THAT REMAINS
- Colin Fraser
- 14 hours ago
- 2 min read
THREE AND A HALF STARS On a farm in Iceland, an aspiring artist, her ex-husband, their three children and dog are navigating the space between marriage and separation.
DRAMA ICELAND Icelandic #THELOVETHATREMAINS Starring Saga Gardarsdóttir, Sverrir Gudnason
Separation is rarely tidy. In Hlynur Pálmason’s THE LOVE THAT REMAINS, it is barely even linear.
The Icelandic director follows a family in the aftermath of divorce with aspiring artist Anna already, if wearily, at terms with separation. Magnus her ex remains, emotionally at least, caught in the wreckage of his past relationship, spending as much time with his family as his working life (which is all at sea on a fishing trawler - geddit?) will allow. The children cheerfully occupy the space in-between, watching, adapting and occasionally being dragged into the adult business of falling out of love. All in all, it’s a pretty sweet and compatible arrangement. They even have picnics together.
Pálmason tells this surprisingly charming story (charming given the throughline of a family struggling with loss and loneliness) through startling images and scenes that are frequently fragmented but always wonderful. He has an eye for the strange beauty of the everyday, turning domestic spaces and Icelandic landscapes into places of mystery, absurdity and occasional menace.
Yet the very qualities that make THE LOVE THAT REMAINS so visually compelling also work against it. Just as an emotional moment begins to land, the film wanders sideways into whimsy, a joke or some wonderfully peculiar bit of business. A sliced fish for example. It’s droll, telling, and then it’s gone.
That tonal slipperiness is both the film’s charm and its frustration. Scenes involving a child and an arrow, or Maggi’s determination to exert manliness by extinguishing an errant rooster, are funny and absurd. But they might otherwise have been an opportunity to explore the pain of a family coming apart. The humour is never unwelcome, but it repeatedly undercuts the depth of the sadness. The same goes for Pálmason’s habit of allowing scenes to fragment or drift away before the emotion has properly settled.Yet there are countless wonderful moments such as the schadenfreude visited upon a boorish gallery owner or Maggi’s vivid encounter with now living scarecrow the kids have been using for target practice. There are countless more, each one another finely crafted piece of Pálmason’s peculiar puzzle.
There is an appealing intimacy to the whole enterprise. The children are the director’s own, as is Panda, the scene-stealing sheepdog. That familiarity gives the performances, and the film itself, an effortless naturalism. His ‘cast’ aren’t performing so much as inhabiting a version of their own family history, which makes the domestic moments particularly convincing.
Much tighter and smaller in scope than the director’s quite exceptional GODLAND, THE LOVE THAT REMAINS is nonetheless an engaging and often beautiful experience. Its fractured structure may frustrate as much as it fascinates, but Pálmason remains a filmmaker capable of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, even when the ordinary is falling apart.
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