Hlynur Pálmason’s Tender Marital Drama

Over three features set in his native Iceland, Hlynur Pálmason has established a distinctive feel for the power of landscapes and elemental forces to shape human relationships, positioning them in stark relief. A feeling as intimate as isolation can take on epic dimensions under the writer-director’s gaze, notably in his 2022 head-turner Godland, an austerely beautiful study of man vs. nature whose spirituality is pierced by shards of wily humor and Lynchian strangeness. Similar qualities are evident in The Love That Remains (Ástin sem eftir er), albeit on a smaller canvas of domestic breakdown.

Serving as his own DP — and shooting on 35mm in Academy ratio — Pálmason’s expansive sense of composition remains striking in this drama of a ruptured marriage, which is never less than compelling even at its most frustrating. His untethered imagination generates images that can function as visual metaphors or abstract enigmas. But as the film evolves into an increasingly fragmented collage of juxtaposed surreal and everyday vignettes, any emotional connection to the characters begins to fade.

There’s a rich history of screen dramas about unraveling marriages that eschew the mawkish tendencies of weepie melodrama. From Kramer vs. Kramer to Shoot the Moon; Scenes From a Marriage to Marriage Story. Asghar Farhadi’s morally complex and culturally specific A Separation is a noteworthy standout of recent decades. On the less rewarding end of the spectrum, Carlos Reygadas’ Our Time is a maddeningly self-indulgent slog and arguably the director’s least interesting movie.

Like that 2018 Mexican feature, Pálmason’s new film also casts members of his own family — his three children — whose unselfconscious spontaneity seems the result of growing up around a father rarely without a camera. The director has always been less interested in plot than character, mood and atmosphere, and this movie’s idiosyncratic storytelling goes a long way toward papering over its flaws. Even if it’s sometimes the cause of them.

It opens with the startling image of a roof being crumpled and lifted off an empty warehouse building by crane, hovering in the air briefly like a UFO before being swung around out of the frame. The building is the former studio of visual artist Anna (Saga Gardarsdottir) and its demolition by developers provides an apt metaphor for the lid being lifted off her world.

She works hard to balance her life as a frazzled but caring mother to three spirited children — teenage Ída (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) and her tow-headed preteen brothers Grímur and Porgils (Grímur and Porgils Hlynsson) — with chasing the elusive next step to gallery representation and wider recognition.

Anna’s methodology for creating her paintings (borrowed from Pálmason’s own visual arts process) is highly physical, hinting at the Herculean strength and dedication required to make art. Working in a field, she arranges large iron cutout shapes on raw canvases, weighting them down with wood or stones and leaving them exposed to the elements through the winter, allowing rust and dirt, rain and snow to “paint” them.

We get little concrete information about what triggered Anna’s breakup with the kids’ father, Magnús (Sverrir Gudnason), who appears already to be living separately from the family when the film begins. He’s away at sea for long stretches on an industrial fishing trawler during herring season and there’s a hint of him not pulling his weight with parental responsibilities.

There’s a sense of the uneasy coexistence of man and nature in scenes with massive nets being hauled in by a mechanized winch and a silver blur of fish by the hundreds funneled into storage while an orca bobs around looking to get a taste of the catch.

Glimpses of Magnús alone in his cabin on the boat, or his prickly interactions with insensitively prying shipmates, quietly reveal his gnawing sense of solitude.

Magnús keeps dropping by the family home unannounced, staying for a meal or just a beer with Anna. There’s even sex on occasion, but mostly, Anna’s residual fondness for him is frayed by impatience and annoyance. She’s ready to move on with her life while he’s like a clingy puppy, refusing to let go. Gudnason plays the awkwardness of these scenes with raw feeling, in contrast to Gardarsdottir’s more matter-of-fact resilience.

Moments in which Magnús gets testy because the boys automatically respond to their mother’s chore requests while they ignore his stabs at basic discipline — like clearing their own dinner plates and loading them into the dishwasher — are poignant illustrations of the way he has become an outsider in his former home.

Anna’s taxing attempts to make professional inroads are distilled in a string of scenes in which a Swedish gallerist (Anders Mossling) accepts her invitation to visit. The dreary windbag shows little interest in the work she has painstakingly hung in a new studio rental (“Are they all the same color?”) then subjects her to a mind-numbing monologue about the health properties of wine over lunch, to which she listens in silence.

When she shows him her works-in-progress laid out in the open field, he’s more attentive to the beauty of the hilltop coastal setting, gasping over the glacier across the bay or stealing an egg from a goose’s nest.

The scene in which she drops him at the airport for his return flight has an acerbic bite. He tells her he has no space for her work and patronizes her with empty assurances that she will find the right gallery, or the right gallery will find her. In response to his joking reference to his mother, Anna mutters, “Your mother’s a whore,” while the dead-eyed look on her face expresses her wish for his plane to crash.

Pálmason and his actors tap the melancholy vein of two people drifting apart after a long shared history when Anna first lies to Magnús about the gallerist’s visit being a success, then opens up about her soul-crushing day, venting her anger about the man’s self-absorbed tediousness. But even in those moments of closeness, it’s clear that while Magnús wants to go back to the way things were, that time has passed for Anna, who discourages him from spending the night and confusing the children. Quite often, she just seems exhausted by him, even if the director shows nonjudgmental compassion for both characters.

One thread that Pálmason shot two years earlier observes the scarecrow figure that Grímur and Porgils assemble on the edge of the field where their mother works, gradually assuming the appearance of an armored knight as the seasons change. They use the effigy as an archery target, which foreshadows an alarming accident late in the film.

The knight also comes to life at one point, paying a nocturnal visit to Magnús, as does a monster-size apparition of the rooster he killed when Anna complained of its aggressive behavior in the chicken coop. But these fantastical interludes — sparked by the b&w creature features Magnús falls asleep watching on late-night TV — tend to be opaque rather than illuminating.

A more effective blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality is a sequence in which Magnús imagines — or does he? — being adrift at sea, waiting to be picked up by a boat to deliver him back to shore. That image of distance, as hope recedes, makes for a haunting closing shot.

Both leads are excellent, conveying the weary sadness of separation, underscored by enduring affections, and the naturalness of the three children adds immeasurably to the drama’s intimacy. Ingvar Sigurdsson (unforgettable in Godland and Pálmason’s previous film, the searing drama of grief and jealousy A White, White Day) makes a welcome appearance as Anna’s warm, down-to-earth dad.

There’s much to admire in Pálmason’s unconventional approach to what could have been familiar domestic drama. But the dreamlike detours threaten to overwhelm the tender portrait of a family breakup.

The film is most affecting in its casual observation — set to the jazz-inflected melodies of Harry Hunt’s Playing Piano for Dad album — of moments like Anna and the three children sprawled across the couch watching TV; a reprieve from separation tension during a family hiking and picnic day, when they pick wild mushrooms and berries; the kids skating on a frozen pond; gently handling fluffy, freshly hatched chicks; or playing basketball as the family’s scene-stealing Icelandic sheepdog Panda (Pálmason’s own dog) darts about barking, wanting to join in.

As imaginative as the surreal departures are, it’s the magic of those quotidian moments in a fractured family’s life that resonate most.