Murray skrifar:
Before we even see a face, Hlynur Pálmason’s “The Love That Remains” immediately establishes the film’s gentle poetry. A crane plucks the roof off a building with the ease of a child dismantling a doll house, the roof swinging as it exposes the sky. It’s an apt metaphor for the collapse of a home in the wake of the separation that plagues one family, and the possibilities that could be in reach. Pálmason’s film is more frustratingly elusive than what its opening shot might suggest, but there’s a miraculous beauty to it nonetheless.
Told in loosely connected vignettes charting a family’s fragmentation over the course of the year, the story reveals itself slowly. Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) is a struggling artist staying at home with her three kids, sometimes venturing outside to paint her canvases with impressions of rust made by metal. But she struggles to get noticed, and an insensitive Swedish gallerist she invites over takes one look at her work and dismisses it as “very earthy, very nature”. Her ex-husband Magnus (nicknamed Maggi and played by Sverrir Guðnason) has moved out of the family home since the break-up. And his isolation is only exacerbated by the real distance enforced by his work spent on a fishing trawler at sea for weeks at a time.
Pálmason returns to the Cannes Film Festival following 2022’s “Godland,” which played in Un Certain Regard. That film, about a Danish priest tasked with building a church in 19th-century Iceland, was a sweeping epic that saw the country’s landscape in all its brutality. In his follow-up, the director trades that ambition for a story that’s decidedly more intimate. Still, it’s hard to ever make Iceland look ugly, and in “The Love That Remains”, the country’s frosty vistas are particularly postcard-worthy. Anna, Maggi and the kids hike up mountains, explore rivers and roam around their sprawling countryside property with not another house in sight. Match cuts illustrate the changing landscape from summer to winter. Pálmason also captures moments of brilliance in the unpredictability of wildlife and nature: a rogue goose protecting her nest, a whale swimming to the surface. Panda, the family’s beloved sheepdog and a talented star in her own right, deserves a mention in the opening credits.
Industrial processes, likewise, are given the same visual reverence as the majestic Icelandic scenery through playful montages accompanied by a light jazz piano score, whether it’s Anna cutting giant shapes out of metal or Maggi’s prepping the boat for a day of catching fish. But is marriage the same? Just another process to the inevitable final destination of heartbreak and loneliness?
Despite this, “The Love That Remains” is unexpectedly hilarious. Such is the case in an excruciating monologue the Swedish gallerist delivers to an uninterested Anna about the health benefits of drinking wine. Or Maggi falling to the ground like a ragdoll as he tries to ensnare a violent rooster to appease Anna. True to its title, love endures in their small family, who find levity when it can. Pálmason’s own children play Anna and Maggi’s teenage daughter and mischievous twin sons, and the three congregate to share wide-ranging, silly conversations about their parents and their own lives — attempting to make sense of a new living situation that’s foreign to them.
But for a film ostensibly about how a divorce fractures a family, the film shows little of it. Details are sporadically fed, but it seems like Anna and Maggi have already split at the beginning of the story. The pair secretly has sex, perhaps because being with each other feels easy, but they hide their low-key relationship from their kids to avoid confusing them. Pálmason’s sparse screenplay doesn’t even explain why the couple split in the first place.
Light on story and heavy on visual grandeur, “The Love That Remains” seems overly reliant on the strength of the filmmaking, where the writing lacks. The montages of nature, while stunning, grow repetitive over two hours. Despite the heavy subject matter, the emotion is barely present. It only gets more frustrating when the film drifts off into fantasy in several late surreal sequences that distract from the grounded reality.
“Think of your family as a greenhouse,” one of Maggi’s co-workers tells him at one point. You need to tend to them like flowers, remove the weeds, and make sure they keep growing. It’s here where the relationship between marriage and nature crystallizes — the wide-open terrain only feels isolating when you explore it alone. And yet, “The Love That Remains” keeps the viewer at a distance, too. There’s a noble search for meaning in the grass, sea and mountains, but it couldn’t hurt to have characters vocalize their feelings even just once. There is a story here, though Pálmason only really alludes to it.
