RIGA IFF: Mīlestība, kas paliek

Hlynur Pálmason
The Love That Remains
Ástin Sem Eftir Er
IS, DK, FR, FI, SE
2025, 109, is
Age 12+

 

Can a divorce be gentle? And, as you’re going through it, can love survive? Once, visual artist Anna and fisherman Magnus were a high school couple madly in love – they soon married, welcomed their firstborn, Ida, and later two boys. Twenty years later, their relationship has grown cold, they have lost the ability to see each other’s needs, and now they are getting divorced. Apathy and sadness intertwine with the sunshine of spotless memories – their farewell is written in the water, on land, by the chicken coop, in the children’s chatter, and on a scarecrow named Joan of Arc. Arrows fly in its direction, but they can hardly be called Cupid’s.

 

The Icelandic author Pálmason is a bard of visual metaphor – if in A White, White Day (2019) the protagonist was renovating a house, and in Godland (2022) a priest was building a church, then in his latest piece, screened at Cannes, we see a house without a roof, used for the prologue scene. Despite the apparent “scenes from a marriage” premise, you won’t find redigested clichés here – Nordic humour and absurdity intertwine with hymns to nature, superb acting (by established Icelandic actors Saga Garðarsdóttir and Sverrir Gudnason), and witty storytelling. Shot near Pálmason’s hometown, the film carries plenty of autobiographical elements, including Anna and Magnus’s children being played by the director’s own offspring – Ida, Þórgils, and Grímur – joined by the family dog Panda, who received the Palm Dog award.