‘The Love That Remains’ review: Follow-up to ‘Godland’ is a tender breakup drama

Dir/scr: Hlynur Palmason. Iceland/Denmark/France/Finland/Sweden. 2025. 109mins.

There’s some extent someplace in the direction of the tip of a wedding breakup when the sense of what may need been is all-consuming. The imprint of the connection is in every single place, and on every thing. Hlynur Palmason’s tender, unexpectedly playful account of the breakup of the wedding of Anna (Saga Gardarsdottir) and Magnus (Sverrir Gudnason), informed in collage kind, digs into that particular second – the purpose at when even probably the most mundane exercise is a reminder of the love misplaced, and the love that continues to be. There’s an undertow of melancholy actually, but additionally a lightweight, buoyant high quality to a movie that cherishes its moments of humour and absurdity.

An intimate image which flirts with fantastical components

Palmason returns to Cannes with this fourth characteristic, this time within the Premiere strand, following his multi-award-winning Un Sure Regard breakout success of Godland. It’s a extra intimate image which flirts with fantastical components, to various levels of success. However the movie shares with Godland an evocative use of the spectacular Icelandic panorama (much less savage and threatening right here, and extra of a playground for the creativeness).

It’s an image wealthy with metaphors. Recollections are as persistent because the weathered rust stains on artist Anna’s canvases; Second World Struggle sea mines that get snarled in Magnus’ trawler nets are just like the argument flashpoints that hreaten to destroy every thing. The which means behind the large, vengeful rooster that stalks Marcus in his sleep is much less clear, however then most households have in-jokes and personal lore that’s baffling to anybody exterior the circle.

Anna, a struggling artist, has simply misplaced her harbour-side studio. The opening shot, taken from contained in the empty constructing, reveals your complete roof wrenched off by a crane – one other visible metaphor, maybe, for the home upheaval that she is enduring. Magnus, in the meantime, sighs closely as he beds down in his cabin within the industrial herring trawler that’s his office and his house away from house for the prolonged durations he spends at sea. The couple have three kids (performed by Palmason’s actual life children); a daughter Ida (Ida Mekkín Hlynsdottir) and two sons Porgils (Porgils Hlynsson) and Grimur (Grimur Hlynsson). The time that all of them spend collectively as a household is heat and welcoming; the couple’s separation continues to be, it turns into clear, very a lot a piece in progress, with occasional intercourse nonetheless on the playing cards.

A jazz-infused piano rating by Harry Hunt loosely hyperlinks the vignettes that make up the movie; the easygoing brio of the music is mirrored within the narrative’s light-footed dance round its interconnected tales and moments of surreality. An prolonged sequence reveals a go to from a pompous blowhard of a gallery proprietor who has little curiosity in Anna’s work – giant canvases in natural earth tones – however who pontificates at size about his theories of wine ingesting and well being. A shot of his small airplane plummeting from the sky after the unsatisfactory go to  is the primary trace that fantasy components are woven into the material of the movie.

The looks of the large rooster is one occasion by which the movie steps over the road between fantasy and actuality. Later a kids’s recreation inexplicably takes on a lifetime of its personal. The children create a life-sized determine sporting what appears like a swimsuit of armour and use it for archery apply. In the direction of the tip of the movie, after an archery-based accident partially skewers one of many boys, the mysterious determine involves life and staggers into the household house, the place it’s found by Magnus. Or is it?

Different photographs present Magnus floating within the sea, ready to be collected by a ship that by no means comes. However this once more could possibly be fantasy, an allegory for the gap that he fears is rising between him and his household. It’s an ingenious strategy to exploring the dynamics of a relationship, however it’s confounding at instances. For probably the most half,the movie is at its most satisfying when it’s rooted within the stable floor of bodily certainties reasonably than drifting untethered from actuality.