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 19th-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).
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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.
