The Love That Remains · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the scarecrow. The children build it in a field, and across the film it stiffens, weathers, and somewhere along the way becomes a knight in armor — a rusting figure standing sentinel in the eastern-Icelandic wind. Pálmason shot that strand roughly two years before the rest of the film, so the rot and the rust are not props. They are real time, caught on the object. And that is the quiet radical thing about The Love That Remains: it does not represent duration, it records it. The seasons turning, the children visibly older, the metal actually oxidizing — the film is a photographic instrument for time passing.

Deleuze split cinema into two great regimes. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it; action closes the gap, and the cut serves the chain of cause and effect. In the time-image, action stops being able to fix anything, and time surfaces as itself. Pálmason begins where the second regime lives. There is no separation to dramatize — Anna and Magnús have already broken up when the film opens — and no reconciliation engine humming underneath. Nobody can act their way out. This is the crisis of the action-image in its most domestic form: the marriage is over as a plot but not as an emotional infrastructure, and the year that follows is a sequence of pickups, dinners, and small quarrels that resolve nothing. What replaces the action is watching. Anna and Magnús become seers — voyants, people who look and endure rather than agents who intervene. Saga Garðarsdóttir and Sverrir Guðnason play exactly that: exhausted tenderness, not acrimony. The film hands them, and us, pure optical and sound situations (opsigns and sonsigns) — a meal, a school run, a body in a doorway framed by weather — moments where there is nothing to do, only to register.

Those held moments are Deleuze's dead time (temps mort): stretches where the story does not advance and the everyday is simply kept in frame until it starts to breathe, sometimes past comfort into comedy. Julius Krebs Damsbo, Pálmason's editor since Godland, cuts for duration, not compression. The near-square Academy frame — the boxy 1.37:1 with the rounded photochemical corners carried over from Godland — does its own work here: it stands people up vertically against sky, wall, and field, and it refuses the horizontal sweep that would turn landscape into scenery. Which points to a second Deleuzian pressure: the recurring shot of small human figures against vast, indifferent natural fields. That composition opens each enclosed domestic scene onto the Open — the sense that this framed family is a small changing set inside a much larger whole that keeps turning whether they heal or not. The seasons are that whole, made visible.

So how does time appear directly? Not as a dated flashback but as a chronosign — time presented in itself, the year as an order one moves through rather than a line one advances along. The scarecrow-knight is the purest instance: an item of production design that is also a unit of narrative time, a clock made of rust. Against this realist throughline erupt the fantastical inserts — a visiting knight, an oversized rooster, a drift out at sea. These aren't plot; they aren't memories either. They're dream-images (onirosigns): fantasy circuits with no localizable source, externalized psychic weather that breaks in without warning and without explanation. Several critics found them the film's chief risk, more opaque than the quotidian around them, and that opacity is the point — they mark places where feeling has no action to discharge into, so it takes surreal shape instead.

There is also a cinema of the body here. Deleuze noticed that when action drains out of cinema, the everyday body starts carrying the time by itself — posture and attitude become the drama. The weary sadness the two leads convey isn't delivered through events; it's held in how they stand, wait, and move around each other in shared rooms. The dog Panda (a Palm Dog winner) belongs to this too: non-human duration, animal presence as ambient time.

Place it in the lineage and the debts are exact. From Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman comes the episodic chronicle of domestic real-time — frontal, static framing of routine, meaning accumulated by duration rather than plot. From Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice comes the elemental long take, the house and tree and figures filmed against weather so the unbroken shot itself carries the weight. From Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor comes the deadpan tableau held long enough for the absurd to walk into banal space uncommented. And from Pálmason's own A White, White Day, Godland, and the short Nest comes the whole durational method: the time-lapsed house-in-landscape, the seasonal shooting that lets things decay on camera, the locked frontal frame, the casting of his own children. This is Bazin's wager pushed to a limit — cinema's contract with the real honored by actually waiting for a year to pass rather than faking it.

What did it do for the art? It proved that the time-image can be warm. Deleuze's seers are usually stranded in postwar rubble or existential drift; Pálmason relocates that patient, action-less looking inside an ordinary family and lets it be funny, tender, and alive. The love that remains is what you can only watch, not fix. Watch the scarecrow rust, and you'll see the whole film.