Anna and Magnus built a life together. They had a home with three kids and a dog. Then they separated. This is where The Love That Remains begins, but as time passes and the reality of their divorce sets in, they’re left to move through a future strained by their unraveling.
Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason’s latest film echoes the radiant visual language of his previous, the 19th-century period piece Godland and contemporary drama A White, White Day. And though its subject matter is heavy, the tone here is admittedly lighter. The aforementioned dog, Panda, even took home the Palm Dog Award at Cannes this year, which — and I’m being very serious here — is an actual award given out. On the surface, The Love That Remains is a story about normal people with normal feelings and normal problems, like how to raise a family while going through a divorce and what to do when one of your kids — who are played by Pálmason’s children — shoots the other in the chest with a bow and arrow. (He’s fine, but he’s gonna need a new sweater.)
Buried deep are existential questions. “Often I think about what is the meaning of all this? When you go through life, you have moments of doubt about just life and things and what’s the meaning of all of it,” Pálmason tells me. “It’s so silly, all of it.” He’s right. It is silly. It’s also life? As we pass through the seasons with Anna and Magnus, we begin to learn what’s left between them.
The director sat down with The Verge to talk about what it’s like to direct your own kids and how he balanced shooting Godland and The Love That Remains at the same time.
Director Hlynur Pálmason Robyn Kanner
Interview edited and condensed.
The Verge: I want to start here. Godland had such a weighty story. The Love That Remains feels lighter, but I think they share similar themes. Do they feel similar to you? Different? I’d be curious to hear you talk about that relationship.
Hlynur Pálmason: Because Godland was this period film and there’s almost like a heaviness with each period film because you have to create everything. You just can’t just take a camera and start shooting whatever. So there was this feeling of wanting to do something with a little bit different energy, like more playful and something that we could almost just go out and shoot. And also, just with a smaller budget and smaller crew. I mean, it was actually very small in Godland, but even smaller in The Love That Remains.
But there is this thing that I have after I moved back home to Iceland, I was always trying to figure out a way of stretching time so I could have more time with each project, which is difficult because of finances. But we kind of found a way to do it by working in parallel on a couple of projects. But we’re developing and writing and shooting various things. And then when we feel like it kind of has formed and we feel that it’s ready and the energy is ready, we kind of select the project that we move forward with. The Love That Remains, in many ways, has been going on for such a long time. Even the first image we shot was in 2017.
It’s quite a long process. Sometimes when you talk about other projects, they are almost happening parallel. I remember shooting scenes from Godland and the same week, shooting a scene for The Love That Remains, which is crazy to think about.
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