The Love That Remains

I was charmed by the Icelandic people on a recent QM2 cruise and eager to be with them again. This film gave me that with its lightheaded symbolism and real life acting. You will love the Icelanders even more.

"The Love That Remains" is a beautiful film about how your bravery or cowardice in the face of intimacy will define you through everything; about how being there for people means more than just being there. And, somehow, about bow-and-arrow safety. In 2022, Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason released two radically different films: “Nest,” a Covid-influenced short about three siblings (the director’s real children) building a treehouse over the course of a year, and “Godland,” an ambitious, gorgeous period piece crafted with photographic precision, which also threw some shade at Iceland’s occasionally uneasy relationship with Denmark (including a funny rant about the Danish language, a frequent butt of jokes in other Scandinavian territories), even though the director himself maintains strong ties to the country from a professional standpoint (he has stated in interviews that, due to the state of the Icelandic film industry, he alternates domestic productions with Danish ones to keep his career active). In a way, both films inform Pálmason’s latest, “The Love that Remains,” which retains the formal rigor (and 4:3 format) of “Godland” and the timespan of “Nest.” It is, in essence, a tale of the four seasons, a year in the life of a family in present-day Iceland. However, it’s not a conventional situation for them: as we meet them, the two parents are in the process of separating and figuring out how the split will affect things going forward. As per the title, the feelings within the family unit (mother, father, three children, and the dog Panda) are still positive, and the interactions between the concerned parties are equally serious and playful over the twelve months depicted in the film. That Pálmason didn’t set out to tell a conventional story about a marriage coming to an end is clear from the opening credits, where each actor – including the adorable, scene-stealing Panda, who went on to win the famous Palm Dog award at the Cannes Film Festival – gets their own mention when they appear on screen during a scene revolving around a family meal. The separation is already underway, but everyone gets along, and it’s clear that any issues will be worked out peacefully or as peacefully as possible, depending on the specific predicament. Resentments are bound to bubble up to the surface, but the general vibe is one of mutual respect and affection, just not the kind that can keep sustaining a relationship. The narrative is by no means autobiographical, but it is definitely personal, as the three children, Ida, Thorgils, and Grímur, not only share their first names with their portrayers but are, in fact, played by Pálmason’s real offspring. This has been going on for a while in Ida’s case, as she has appeared in all of her father’s projects, starting with “A White White Day” (whose lead actor, Icelandic star Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson, also shows up in “The Love that Remains” in a supporting role); her younger brothers joined the family business with “Nest,” and one gets the sense that directing his real children allows Pálmason to blend the artistic and the personal in an intriguing manner, as he gets to do what he loves without spending too much time away from them. And while some corners of the Internet might get up in arms over the nepotism (assuming they will put a European film under the same scrutiny they reserve for Hollywood productions), the younger cast members acquit themselves well, with Ida, in particular, proving a valuable scene partner for both of her on-screen parents, played by Saga Gardarsdóttir and Sverrir Gudnason. The former, best known in Iceland as a stand-up comedian, gets her finest dramatic showcase to date, finding all the right nuances as a mother trying to adjust to a sea change (an aptest turn of phrase, given the role water plays in the characters’ lives); the latter, who gained international recognition when he starred in “Borg vs. McEnroe,” gets to embrace his Icelandic side again after almost three decades of performing almost exclusively in Swedish, and it is pretty fitting that this homecoming of sorts should come in the shape of a character whose own domestic situation is undergoing a significant transformation. Said transformation is handled with gentle maturity, as Pálmason aims to capture the more mundane aspects of the separation rather than going melodramatically big as the genre is often inclined to do (“Marriage Story” this is not). He zeroes in on the family (literally, with his choice of aspect ratio) and lets their feelings come out naturally, the good and the (occasional) bad coexisting in a balance that isn’t always harmonious but never shifts into the destructive acrimony that is the bread and butter of divorce courts (and decades’ worth of dramas and comedies on the subject). Life goes on, though not quite in the same manner as before, and through the director’s portrait of four seasons of marital evolution, we get small, simple, compelling slices of it.