The Love That Remains an intimate family divorce drama

From Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Palmason (Godland, A White, White Day), this family story is intimate but emotionally guarded, lightly funny but deeply melancholy.

The Love That Remains (in Icelandic, Swedish, French and English, with subtitles) could be called a divorce drama, but Palmason’s “scenes from a marriage” aren’t the usual round of regret, recrimination and wall-punching we see in such tumultuous films as Marriage Story.

Using a slow, subdued narrative that is both intermittently surreal and sweetly, completely mundane, the 41-year-old filmmaker starts with the separation of Anna (Saga Gardarsdottir) and Magnus (Sverrir Gudnason) as a quietly established fact.

He then tracks a year in the life of this rural family as the former couple and their somewhat confused children attempt to adjust, mostly with good intentions and the love that’s right there in the title. (Mostly.)

The kids are played with messy, easygoing naturalism by the director’s own children, daughter Ida Mekkín Hlynsdottir and twin boys Grímur Hlynsson and Thorgils Hlynsson. There’s also the family dog, Panda, an Icelandic sheepdog who plays herself and is easily the most emotionally accessible character onscreen. (For her standout work, Panda won last year’s Palm Dog at Cannes. Who’s a good girl?)

Anna is a visual artist who makes large, time-intensive pieces that draw on the breathtaking natural landscape around her. She’s over 40 and has never had a studio with a bathroom, she mentions at one point, and she’s “getting tired of peeing in a bucket.”

This career crisis is not helped by the hilariously awful Swedish gallerist who comes to look at her work.

“He just talks and talks,” she relates later to Magnus, and that’s not a compliment in this soft-spoken family.

Magnus works on a fishing trawler and is often at sea — both literally and figuratively, it turns out — allowing Palmason to subtly explore ideas about male isolation, a theme he covered in A White, White Day.

Palmason is not really a plot guy, and here he is much more interested in the textures and rhythms of daily life. He conveys Anna and Magnus’s labour in patient detail, following Anna as she laser-cuts weathering steel and Magnus as he works among reeled-out ropes of fishing nets and silvery showers of herring.

The kids mess around outside, skating, tobogganing, digging, getting up to things with bows and arrows. There are chickens, geese and sturdy Icelandic ponies. The family forages for berries and mushrooms.

Daily domestic routines are set against the longer cycles of nature, with Palmason offering up stunning, sweeping shots that take in cliffs and sea and track the passing seasons with repeated images of snow, mist, drizzle and summer sun.

It’s deliberately undramatic but never dull, partly because of Palmason’s observational camera and carefully considered framing, and partly because of the sheer beauty of the backdrop.

Through the clatter of dishes and racks of drying laundry, we see the family in short impressionistic bursts of silliness or happiness or exhaustion. Palmason uses these seemingly casual interactions to gradually tease out some of the family’s dynamics, though even deep emotions tend to be randomly overheard rather than explained.

Pain comes out sideways in The Love That Remains, with deep-set issues disguised by conversations about an obstreperous rooster or dishwashing protocol.

Feelings also break through in dreams and visions and sudden surreal events — sometimes comic, sometimes slightly sinister. Palmason’s tendency to mix everyday actuality and crazy metaphor culminates in a final sequence that viewers might find poetic, disquieting or just plain exasperating.

Palmason is clearly willing to risk a little audience exasperation. He has a genius for catching passing moments and a tender affection for domestic life, but The Love that Remains purposely keeps its individual characters at arm’s length. The results are lovely and delicate but ultimately enigmatic — sometimes too enigmatic.

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