“The Love We Remain”, the best remedy for Christmas films

I heard your disappointment yesterday, Guillaume Erner, when I announced that I was going to speak about literature: what? It’s Wednesday, and I’m not even talking about the release of an independent art film? Well here it is. The long-awaited film. It is indeed Icelandic, and I have, in my legendary kindness, spared you the name of its director: Hlynur Pálmason. Hlynur Pálmason is, to put it mildly, a very great filmmaker of our time. We owe him an incredible historical film released in 2022, Goldland, the adventures of a young priest who arrived on the island in the 19th century to found a Christian community. This one is called The love we have leftand it is a contemporary family chronicle, an ideal film to prepare for Christmas. A film full of paradoxes and contrasts, harsh and sweet, funny and tragic, sunny and icy.

At the beginning of the film, the family is gathered around a table set in the garden. There is the eldest daughter, a teenager, two twin boys around ten years old, the mother, the father, an uncle, the grandparents, and the dog Panda. It’s summer, we eat, we drink, we ruckus and we laugh. The people are beautiful, blond, tanned. The situation has something of an advertising feel to it. But the clashing staging, which follows the movements of each person, is not, and little discordant, slightly grotesque features insinuate themselves into the Epinal image, which culminate when we realize that the dog has rolled into something unsavory – it makes the kids laugh and annoys the adults. In short, something stinks.

In fact, this family is like all families, strange and not very functional, and the film that follows them season after season depicts it in all its beauty and all its madness. We quickly understand that the parents are separating, and are moving awkwardly in an intermediate zone between love and weariness, in front of slightly perplexed children. He, a fisherman, leaves on a boat, while she deals with everyday life at home, the turbulent boys playing dangerous games, notably a bow and arrows, the use of which provokes one of the most terrible and funny scenes in the film, and then her work as a visual artist, which she carries out in the countryside, in front of the sea, very close to the family home.

A very generous film that welcomes everything and everyone

All the love we have left” is therefore a family chronicle coupled with an artist’s portrait, it is the mother, Anna, the main character. Anna who prints rust-colored patterns on large canvases while letting metal cutouts that she made in the workshop with her brother rest there for months. The passing of time, the rain, the snow, the aging of materials: this is what makes her work beautiful. It is also what makes this film so good, certainly one of my favorites this year, a film full of life and death, the beginning and the end of all things.

Above all, a very generous film, which welcomes everything and everyone: the separating couple – a true cinema cliché, the portrait of a woman; but also the children, their games and their anxieties; the animals, numerous and which are real characters in the film – the dog, a particularly weak-willed rooster, a horse, and a goose which lays an egg like a treasure which is stolen by an ill-intentioned gallery owner visiting Anna; and finally the objects and places: this scarecrow which serves as a mannequin for the children, the family house where we make jams and where we argue, and this Icelandic shore which is both sublime and frightening in the sun or the snow. Everything – humans, animals and landscapes – is as if on the same level, viewed with the same humor and gentleness in front of Hlynur Pálmason’s camera. Brief, All the love we have left is the best Christmas movie, while also being the best cure for Christmas movies.