The Love That Remains overview – startling tragicomic portrait of a fractured circle of relatives

Icelandic film-maker Hlynur Pálmason gave us the haunting historic drama Godland and the difficult and peculiar mystery A White, White Day; now he has modified issues up with this startling, a laugh, vaguely irritating film. The Love That Remains is a portrait of a fractured circle of relatives and a sundered marriage which, with its dreamy piano ranking, myth visions and quirky sequences to head with the dead-serious scenes of purported emotional ache, introduces a somewhat disconcerting however indubitably intriguing new comedian tone.

Pálmason’s visible and compositional sense is as commanding as ever, with some shocking imagery of the Icelandic panorama. But it’s flavoured with a brand new tone of continual, playful unseriousness, which after all morphs right into a tragicomic spectacle of male loneliness. In some puts this movie doesn’t have the load and the have an effect on of his previous paintings, however it’s indubitably attractive.

This is the tale of Maggi, or Magnus (Sverrir Gudnason), who works on a fishing trawler. He is now divorced or no less than separated from his artist spouse Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), who creates massive canvases and works with steel, and likewise photographic initiatives and land artwork, operating steadily outside, at the circle of relatives’s personal land. They have two sons and a daughter, whose granddad is performed in cameo by means of Pálmason’s longtime lead actor Ingvar Sigurdsson; they amuse themselves firing arrows at a humanoid goal they have got rigged up on a pole – an overly unhealthy hobby, because it seems.

Poor Magnus is all the time appearing up, asking to look the the children, striking out with the circle of relatives from whom he’s now supposedly estranged; at one level, they cross on a swimming-trip-slash-picnic and Magnus is handled to an ecstatic upskirt imaginative and prescient of Anna as she stands over him. Is it in fact taking place? Or simply in his raddled, lonely, sexy creativeness? But Anna is clearly very exasperated with Magnus and feels sorry for him, towards her higher judgment, permitting him to be together with her and the youngsters as a result of so obviously he has no thought how you can arrange his post-separation lifestyles, and it’s taking a horrible toll. She is starting to hate him.

Or is she? Hard emotional realities of this type are all the time being softened and changed by means of quirky visible innovations. Magnus takes it upon himself to kill the wayward chicken that they retain on their land, as a result of Anna have been complaining about its competitive behaviour; this is a scene that speaks of Magnus’s personal thwarted and decreased masculinity. It is adopted by means of a dream series by which this chicken, enlarged to monstrous measurement and impressed by means of the dreaded film on TV to which Magnus had fallen asleep, comes again to take his revenge. It’s rather humorous – however possibly now not humorous sufficient to be absolutely a hit as a poignant second.

There are different dream moments. An obnoxious Swedish artwork broker who patronises Anna and her paintings meets a horrible finish. A sword lands Pythonesquely from the sky simply subsequent to the youngsters’s sword-target which has a medieval helmet. Meanwhile, close to Magnus’s trawler, an outdated 2d international conflict mine has seemed – every other flourish of metaphorical risk. The impact is smooth, sympathetic, diverting and steadily very chic and oblique. But it withholds from us the entire, actual ache of broken love.