Hlynur Pálmason is an Icelandic director, screenwriter and visual artist whose remarkable, picturesque feature films – Winter Brothers, A White, White Day, Godland and, now, The Love That Remains – have hoovered up prizes at the international festivals that matter, and been selected as the Icelandic entry for best international feature at the Academy Awards on three occasions.
The copious honours are now a family affair. Last May, Pálmason’s dog Panda was the deserving recipient of the Palm Dog, the prize honouring the canine best in show at the Cannes film festival. (Previous winners include Messi, from Anatomy of a Fall, and Tilda Swinton’s waggy-tailed companions, Rosy, Dora and Snowbear, from The Souvenir Part II.)
The Love That Remains features Panda and the director’s family in key roles. Shooting with 35mm stock left over from other projects, and working with a small crew, Pálmason blended written and rehearsed scenes and dialogue with occasional unscripted surprises into a transportive comic crowd-pleaser about divorcing parents and their lively offspring and animals.
“The strange thing with this film is that it’s spread over such a long period,” the director says. “The first image was shot in 2017, and some chapters were filmed over the last couple of years. When we went into principal photography, the script was quite ready. Most of the things that feel spontaneous are actually written and rewritten during filming.
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“But there were moments where we tried to capture real reactions, like when the jam mixer implodes and the berries fly into the air. I didn’t tell my son that would happen, so his reaction was natural. But all the dialogue was practised.”
This domestically rooted project initially feels like a much smaller film than Godland, the director’s epic historical drama from 2022 about a Lutheran priest dispatched to Iceland from Denmark for a colonial folly akin to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Roland Joffé’s The Mission.
“I wasn’t interested in making a film this time if it wasn’t rooted in my children and my surroundings,” Pálmason says. “We make small, independent films with limited budgets, so when writing I think about accessibility: people, spaces, objects I already have. When you stretch a project over years, your life colours it more. It absorbs experiences like a sponge. And after Godland, I wanted to make something that would be more playful, warmer and a little silly.”
Sure enough, what starts out as a family affair expands into a surreal fantasia. Quiet rhythms of shared meals, seasonal chores and children moving between parents – Anna, an artist played by Saga Gardarsdóttir, and Magnus, a frequently absent fisherman played by Sverrir Gudnason – are soon punctuated by such uncanny intrusions as a medieval knight and a giant rooster. An elitist gallery owner meets an ending worthy of Wile E Coyote.
“I’m always trying to create the same experience for the audience that I have while making the film,” Pálmason says. “If something surprises me in the process, I try to convey that so the audience is surprised too. That’s very important to me. I also knew I could push it into a more absurd phase with a strong foundation: a family we believe in, with real feelings and ups and downs. That was important so I could push toward more edgy or eccentric elements.”
Watching a knight in armour roaming around far-flung Iceland, it’s impossible not to think about Roy Andersson, the Swedish auteur famed for deadpan humour, melancholic predicaments and meticulously composed tableaux featuring such incongruities as King Charles XII of Sweden and his 18th century cavalry entering a modern dive bar.
“Roy Andersson has inspired me a lot,” Pálmason says. “I admire his process. The way you make a film shapes its temperament. Humour is tricky: you need a friendly atmosphere where people can take risks and not be afraid of looking silly. That’s what we tried to create, especially for my children.”
Pálmason, who was born in 1984 in Höfn, an Icelandic fishing town, studied at the National Film School of Denmark, in Copenhagen. He remained in the Danish capital – a city with a fecund film industry – for more than a decade before returning to Höfn, on the Hornafjördur fjord. Sense of place is clearly important to him.
“It’s on the southeast coast,” he says. “It’s isolated, near the glacier, and the landscape varies a lot. After 12 years in Copenhagen, my wife, children and I moved back home. The last three films were shot there. It’s an ongoing process of working from home, with my surroundings and the people I know, trying to make film-making as homemade as possible.”
Pálmason maintains an active visual-art practice. In The Love That Remains, Anna creates large-scale, time-based works by placing metal cutouts on canvas and leaving them to rust in the Icelandic landscapes. These striking pieces were created by Pálmason himself. The film allows him to stretch out in many directions.
“The act of creating exterior works – prints or paintings in the landscape – is something I’ve explored for a long time,” he says. “I wanted to portray that visually, connecting the character to the land. I tried to find an artist who could play the part. It became complicated, so I incorporated my own process.”
[ Godland: A crisis of faith plays out against spectacular Icelandic tableauxOpens in new window ]
Temporal rust patterns feel analogous to his work as a film-maker. For a project about divorce, The Love That Remains couldn’t be less like Kramer vs Kramer. We are never certain about the particulars underpinning the separation, nor do we see the happy children mewling for reconciliation.
“I respond strongly to not knowing,” Pálmason says. “It triggers my imagination. I don’t pretend to know everything about the characters. When actors ask for backstories I often can’t answer. I follow intuition. I didn’t want to show them arguing and screaming. I’ve seen that before. I wanted to portray the family differently, and to focus on time spent together and the subtle pressures within it.”
Icelandic cinema has expanded internationally since the 1990s. The directors Grímur Hákonarson and Benedikt Erlingsson have scored international hits with Rams and Woman at War. Baltasar Kormákur alternates between domestic projects and Mark Wahlberg actioners.
And Pálmason’s native country is increasingly used as an international filming location, with glaciers, volcanoes, lava fields and black-sand beaches serving as otherworldly destinations in Game of Thrones, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Oblivion. (There are notable similarities with the industry in Ireland.) The Icelandic film scene is expanding at a time when Pálmason, conversely, is happy to contract.
“In Denmark, I was introduced to a very professional system with large crews and specialised roles,” he says. “That’s great, but I found it too big. I want to stretch time. We work with as few people as possible. I don’t like big setups, screens, chairs or catering. We try to remove unnecessary things and spend as much time as possible with the material. Often, when you finish a film, you feel you only scratched the surface because everything moved too fast. I try to avoid that.”
The Love That Remains is one of only a handful of features that currently scores 100 per cent on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator. The premiere at Cannes was greeted by one of the festival’s longer and rowdier standing ovations. Ari Aster, director of Hereditary and Midsommar, has publicly championed the film. But there was one audience that Pálmason was particularly determined to please.
“Hearing my children laugh loudly in the cinema was wonderful. They were proud, and that meant a lot to me.”
The Love That Remains is in cinemas from Friday, March 13th
