The Love that Remains

Hlynur Pálmason’s fourth feature opens with a startling fragment – a metaphorical cue that appears in various shapes and textures, echoing across different situations and eventually forming a playful and equivocal leitmotif. A dark, deserted space, illuminated only by warm sunlight piercing through windows to reach a barren wall. Mere seconds later, without giving the viewer time to adjust or settle their gaze, the frame erupts with loud rumbling and creaking as the shoddy roof appears to be lifted from the edifice. The contours of the room become more discernible, with sunlight pouring through a wider opening, making the space seem even more desolate... though not entirely so, as the now-separated roof dangles in midair, appearing barely held in place by an off-frame crane. Eventually, it moves away, leaving the upper part of the frame to the pale sky. The image: an edifice on the verge of demolition, barely holding itself together. At which point does it cease to be what it was? If it is no more, then what remains?

The Love That Remains does not venture fully into the philosophical realm that this question might initially imply – not that the viewer is discouraged from reflecting on ontological paradoxes through images, but rather that Pálmason’s curiosity and interest as a filmmaker are directed toward the idea of change on a far more tangible, emotional, and natural level. What is most compelling about the film is how it never serves the idea of change for narration’s sake, as it articulates almost no clear progression from beginning to end, from a dramaturgical standpoint.

Following the course of a one-year period, The Love That Remains is composed of loosely connected vignettes revolving around an Icelandic family with three children. Although our first encounter depicts an outwardly happy nuclear family, we gradually come to understand that the parents, Anna and Maggi, are separated – though not entirely, as they still spend time together with their children, and Maggi never misses a chance to make a move on Anna... Why they split in the first place is not necessarily the film’s concern, nor is whether they will get back together. It is this peculiar, confusing, no less toxic yet affectionate connection – one even tinged with desire – in which the film’s interest lies: a relationship that is no more, yet still barely holding together.

While Anna and Maggi’s marital “situationship” occupies a considerable space within the narrative economy, the fragmentary and elliptical approach with which Pálmason engages everyday life and its rhythms steers the film away from what might otherwise have been a conventional relationship drama. Anna’s creative process and struggles as an artist, along with Maggi’s frustrations and his inner battle with fragile masculinity while working at sea on a fishing vessel, allow the film to expand its emotional scope, toward situations that involve surprising and witty instances of magical realism. Anna’s interactions with the insufferable gallery owner, which rely heavily on deadpan humour, and Maggi’s nightmarish encounter with the rooster he killed – returning in a giant-scaled version to avenge himself, perhaps a little too obviously depicting a damaged male ego – are among the many formal parentheses that Pálmason delights in opening.

There may be no real narrative progression, but motion and energy can be felt in every corner of the film. Change and transformation – with everything they take away and leave behind – unfold not only on a human, emotional register, but through the broader lens of natural cycles and revolutions: growth, decline, florescence, decomposition, and putrefaction, all of which Pálmason films with a keen, engrossed gaze. The most impressive and enigmatic example through which Pálmason explores this idea is the half-scarecrow, half-knight figure the children build over the course of the year, a process that finds its counterpart in Anna’s artistic practice, where change is articulated through natural elements and patterns that emerge from corrosion, dust, dampness, and air.

Though operating with a distinctive visual identity – 4:3 aspect ratio, bright and pale colours filtered through the soft, rich texture of the film stock – Pálmason is far from being a rigorous formalist. On the contrary, in keeping with the playfulness of his narrative approach, his camerawork is unrestrained and malleable. While he favours static medium-length shots with occasional close-ups, he does not shy away from moving the camera. This can be seen in the scenes where Anna shows her work to the gallery owner, or in the kitchen where the camera pans back and forth between one of the twins, who throws blueberries, and Anna, who tries to catch them in her mouth. Even working within the framework of a fully scripted fiction, one feels an invitation for the spontaneity and the unexpected emanating from Pálmason’s images toward the profilmic reality. However trivial it may sound to some, the children in the film being portrayed by his own children, Anna’s ever-sweet and curious dog Panda being his own dog, and the decision to shoot the film where he lives and works all highlight the porous boundaries between reality and fiction that his approach establishes. As his camera lingers on the children’s faces, one can’t help but wonder where a filmmaker’s gaze begins and where a father’s gaze ends... Lucky for us, The Love That Remains inhabits both gazes, like a cinematographic palimpsest: a curious artefact whose raison d’être lies in embracing and holding onto remnants, whether of nature, images, memory or love.