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Tivoli Theatre – After Hours Film Society Presents The Love That Remains
Reviewed by Clint Worthington | RogerEbert.comAt first blush, the subject matter of “The Love That Remains” might clash with writer-director Hlynur Pálmason‘s previous works: Where “Godland” offered an icy glimpse at religion and history, and “A White, White Day” consumes itself with grief and revenge, his latest takes the shape of a warmer, winsome, albeit bittersweet family drama. Set, as always for him, amid the glaciers and mountains of the Icelandic landscape (captured on 35mm film by Pálmason himself, who served as his own cinematographer), Iceland’s entry for Best International Film at this year’s Oscars places a fractured family amid those gorgeously-rendered locales, and charts a year in their lives as they try, good sense be damned, to make sense of it all.Filmed over the course of years (as is Pálmason’s ever-patient way), “The Love That Remains” plays out as a series of strange, sentimental, often surrealistic vignettes meant not to chart the chronology of a family in fracture, but to convey the oddly liminal space they inhabit. Husband Magnus (Sverrir Gudnason), or Maggi, spends long hours on a fishing trawler doing the quotidian work of a working man out on the sea; Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), his recently separated spouse, is a visual artist struggling to work with metal and rust to create vast tapestries on the sheep and horse-populated acreage of their family ranch.
Their three kids—an older daughter and two twin boys, all played by Pálmason’s real-life children—concern themselves with the everyday play of Icelandic children, which largely involves building and shooting arrows at an armored mannequin they set up on a cliffside pole. (The fate of this particular golem, and the arrows these children shoot at it, make for some brilliant visual gags.) And, of course, don’t forget Panda, the unstoppably cute Icelandic sheepdog that’s so vital to the film’s fabric Pálmason gifts him with his very own card in the opening credits.
Despite the pall of familial dissolution that falls over every scene, there’s a deceptive sweetness to “The Love That Remains”‘s simple, hypnotic rhythms. The Bergman comparisons are cheap, but apt—think the fly-on-the-wall marital arguments of “Scenes From a Marriage” mixed with the bursts of surrealism that intrude upon “Wild Strawberries” or “Fanny & Alexander.” By the time we peek in on this family, Maggi and Anna are already separated, but they haven’t quite locked down the boundaries that come with it. When Maggi’s not out at sea, they still spend time together, talking about frustrated dates and doing the hard work of parenting kids who still don’t quite get what’s up with Mom and Dad. (Late in the film, they still wonder whether their parents have sex. One hopes they still do.)
Anna appears more settled and secure, albeit yearning for her art career to take off; in one scene, a talkative art dealer drags her on a tedious wine lecture before she learns he does not, in fact, have a spot for her in his gallery. But Maggi seems more adrift, lost at sea—a metaphor Pálmason is more than happy to literalize, like so many others here. He’s a man who simply does not know what to do without the purpose and stability of a family. Maggi bugs Anna during their visits to still have sex sometimes; Anna, meanwhile, entertains the occasional thought that she wishes he were dead.
This contrast between the warmth of these interactions and the coldness of what’s actually happening to this family allows “The Love That Remains” to flit between naturalism and the fantastical with remarkable unpredictability. The film’s opening shot features a roof being painstakingly torn off a house, a potent symbol for the destruction of this family unit. Then, we get the typical kitchen-table routines, delivered with bittersweet charm by our cast. But every so often, a giant rooster will invade Magnus’ dreams, or a sword will fall from the sky next to the dummy in armor that the kids have set up, Excalibur-like. These slide nicely along the film’s vignette-like structure, as if clear-eyed moments of familial comfort exist alongside the hazy daydreaming of fantasy.
It can read as unapproachable to someone expecting a more straightforward narrative, but the episodic nature of these vignettes offers glimmers of insight. Pálmason’s wistful compositions, frequently unfolding in beautiful still tableaus, take on interesting shades, whether he’s going for kitchen-sink realism or the kinds of flights of fancy reserved for Roy Andersson pictures. It all feels so very sad, but also warm and rewarding, in much the same way we reminisce about our own childhoods, or the relationships that didn’t work out.
“The Love That Remains” plays out with remarkable intuition and sensitivity about its troubled characters, ones who try to love and reckon with hard feelings when those endeavors don’t work out, and you have to sift through the rubble to find meaning. Some find it in their art; some don’t find it at all. And that floating feeling is one that Pálmason captures expertly, especially in his patient final frames.
$7.00 Members | $11.00 Non-Members
TIVOLI THEATRE
5021 Highland Avenue | Downers Grove, IL
630-968-0219 | classiccinemas.com