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When he speaks of his inspirations, the Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur P\u00e1lmason mentions as many visual artists as movie directors: in particular, <\/span>he has cited<\/span><\/a> the photographer Sally Mann, who photographed her family over the course of many years, and Monet, who painted the water lilies in his own garden again and again. <\/span>Godland<\/span><\/i>, Hlynur\u2019s previous feature, was a historical period piece, about a Danish priest on an errand into the 19th-century Icelandic wilderness, that was praised for its rigorous and magisterial formalism, in shots like the time-lapse montage of a horse decomposing across a year, in all kinds of light and in all kinds of weather; the horse was Hlynur\u2019s father\u2019s, and he would photograph it every day on the way home from dropping the kids off at school, part of an artistic practice that is deliberately interwoven with his everyday life.<\/span><\/p>\n His new film, <\/span>The Love That Remains<\/span><\/i>, is ostensibly a slice-of-life dramedy about a very Icelandic family: mom Anna (Saga Gar\u00f0arsd\u00f3ttir) and dad Magnus (Sverrir Gu\u00f0nason) are separated, but he comes over for dinner and stays late into the midsummer white nights to play basketball with the kids. But more than a particular narrative, the film is an attempt to, as Hlynur has described, \u201cwork with what surrounds me,\u201d and to allow the raw materials of family and landscape to unfold over time in a process that might be called \u201cslow filmmaking\u201d (as opposed to \u201cslow cinema\u201d; he generally has several projects on the boil at once, each taking multiple years to finish).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Anna and Maggi\u2019s children are played by Hlynur\u2019s own children, twin sons Gr\u00edmur and \u00deorgils and teen daughter Ida, who is more mature and moody than she was in her supporting role in <\/span>Godland <\/span><\/i>just a couple years ago. The family hike and gather blueberries and mushrooms near Hlynur\u2019s real family home in the shadow of the glacier Vatnaj\u00f6kull; fisherman Maggi goes out to see to reel in the herring nets;on a fencepost overlooking the North Atlantic; the kids rig up a dummy, a knight in armor, on a fencepost, and shoot at it with a bow and arrows. Hlynur films it from the same angle in every time of year and in every kind of weather: rain, snow, wind, mud, endless summer nights and dark icy winters. Time flows on in montages of still images and tableaux, particularly close-ups of the children posing for the camera, which, especially when accompanied by Harry Hunt\u2019s gentle piano score, seem like photos in a family album. And the seasons, they go round and round\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n Anna is an artist whose work, like Hlynur\u2019s, is time-based: she covers large canvases in abstract metal shapes and leaves them outdoors in a field for months, letting the metal rust and the rust transfer to the canvases in unpredictable ways. This is also the method by which the eminent Icelandic sculptor J\u00f3hann Eyfells made his majestic sculpture-on-canvas \u201c<\/span>Cloth Collapsion<\/span><\/a>\u201d; <\/span>The Love That Remains <\/span><\/i>is filled with visual echoes, deliberate or otherwise, of contemporary Icelandic visual art, including Olafur Eliasson\u2019s photo series <\/span>Cars in Rivers<\/span><\/i><\/a> and the overhead views of moss, grass and wildflowers, bordering on abstraction, of <\/span>Eggert P\u00e9tursson<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n At the outset of her career, Saga was a standup comic whose act was built on her goofy, windmilling stage presence and edgy hanging-with-the-boys quips; here, in lithsome early middle age, she\u2019s strikingly grown-up and wind-whipped as she considers romantic independence and artistic frustration (including a mean-spirited and very funny interlude in which a pretentious Swedish gallerist visits, talks nonsense at her nonstop, and then declines to represent her). It\u2019s a wistful central performance in a film that sketches out the easy rhythms of family life (and features the Icelandic sheepdog Panda in a scene-stealing turn as herself), but though grounded in the domestic, verisimilitude is not the film\u2019s primary concern.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Hlynur\u2019s scripts, organized around stark elemental oppositions and broad thematic strokes, have the feeling of being composed more than written; striking vignettes illustrating the push-pull of old lust, or the burgeoning rift between a parent and a child, unfold in frozen gestures moreso than as dramatic choreography; the film arranges elaborate visual concepts to demonstrate violent chance, earthy sensuality, and especially patriarchal self-flagellation. Maggi\u2019s directionless outside the nuclear family is here rendered literally with a striking shot of Sverrir floating on his back in the ocean, buffeted by the tides with a setting sun in the far distance. <\/span>The Love That Remains <\/span><\/i>becomes increasingly surreal as it goes, with Hlynur\u2019s cast acting out slapstick sight gags and dream sequences inspired by B-movies and Bergman. The movie corkscrews along until it finally just ends \u2014\u00a0 but Hlynur\u2019s life, and the lives of his children and the natural world that surrounds them, continue.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nGet more Little White Lies<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n