The Love That Stays opens with a easy shot of a development crane prying the roof off of an empty constructing by the ocean. Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), watches from her automobile as builders tear aside her artwork studio, her canine by her facet. The shot lingers because the roof slowly tilts and drifts out of the body whereas the movie’s title playing cards roll. With out fuss, Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason establishes the movie’s central premise — the quiet dismantling of a house and the heightened publicity to pure forces that follows.
Pálmason’s fourth function is broadly in regards to the separation between Anna, an artist, and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason), an industrial fisherman in rural Iceland. Pálmason would not reveal the reason for their rift, and as an alternative locations the viewer in its aftermath. With out her studio, Anna begins working outdoor, the place a lot of her observe entails urgent massive slabs of iron onto canvas. Anna lives with their three kids, performed by Pálmason’s real-life kids, and his real-life sheepdog, Panda, whereas Magnús spends most of his time at sea. He makes an attempt to keep up a presence in his household’s life by dropping into the home when he can, however his visits really feel extra like he is overstaying his welcome than he’s a lacking piece coming into place. There’s much less animosity between the 2 than there’s pity from Anna towards Magnús. She sees their relationship as over, whereas he sees issues as extra difficult.
Saga Garðarsdóttir with Þorgils Hlynsson, Grímur Hlynsson and Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir.
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Janus Movies
Pálmason’s follow-up to 2022’s Godland shares its predecessor’s arresting and cinematic visuals, which painting nature as each serene and a drive to be reckoned with. Via cautious observations of the attractive and the ugly, Pálmason emphasizes the inseparable bond between nature, household, and love — all parts of the world which might be eternally altering and require tending to. Scenes of home life are minimize between vignettes of the pure world, from luscious inexperienced landscapes to a mushroom being torn open, with the movie’s melodic, piano-driven soundtrack including an affecting layer of sentimentality. It’s no coincidence that Magnús works at sea, certainly one of many pure forces that place him in stress between management and give up. At occasions he makes an attempt to reassert himself as a gift and authoritative determine in his household, whereas at others, he appears to simply accept the fact: the dynamics at dwelling have modified. However a repeated picture of Magnús floating on his again within the ocean suggests which he in the end yields to.
In The Love That Stays, the kids’s outlooks on the world are as outstanding as their mother and father’ and at occasions, their roles reverse. Whereas on the highway along with his teenage daughter Ída (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) behind the wheel, Magnús confesses that he killed their rooster with a rock. To her dismay, he explains that he did not need to do it, however her mom requested him to eliminate it. He affords a clouded clarification about how generally whenever you’re an grownup, it’s a must to do issues that you do not need to do. His daughter pushes again, insisting, “There is no method I will be like that,” and the 2 argue. Together with her fingers on the wheel and Magnus within the passenger seat, her ardent response is marked by an ethical readability that Magnus’ maturity appears to have eroded.
You would be forgiven for forgetting you are not watching an actual household on display; by means of sustained observations of its characters and their environment, the movie permits that means to emerge over time fairly than by means of heavy-handed narrative arcs. However Pálmason surprises in moments when the movie indulges in a fantasy realm tinged with humor. After Anna hosts a painstakingly lengthy assembly with a gallerist who’s extra involved with speaking about pure wine than her work, she imagines his airplane magnificently crashing. And in a single scene, a rooster — a large model of the one Magnús killed — comes again to hang-out him, taking him by the beak and repeatedly throwing him towards the wall.
In an early dinner desk dialog in regards to the household canine, Panda, Anna’s father says, “Life is nothing however a f****** problem, however animals convey us pleasure,” a line reflecting each the trivialities and absurdity of on a regular basis existence. Pálmason’s The Love That Stays would not try and make a grand thesis on love and household, however efficiently captures each its smallness and treasured enormity.
