One of the constants in the intimate films of Joachim Trier is his ability to bring out the very best in his actors. With emotional acuity, he mines their inner lives for truths that seem subcutaneously to connect his cast to his characters. Actors don’t so much play roles in the Danish-Norwegian director’s work as live inside them. His transcendent 2022 feature, The Worst Person in the World, is both a romantic comedy and an anti-rom-com, a close study of a woman navigating a messy transitional period, alive with intergenerational insights and foibles most of us can recognize from some point in our lives.
Trier’s exquisite new film, Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi), shifts its gaze from romantic to familial love, at times harmonious and at others tainted by resentment and anger. The director’s observation of the mutable contracts between sisters, and even more so, fathers and daughters, is intensely affecting in a movie freighted with melancholy but also leavened by surprising notes of humor. As always with Trier’s films, its depth of feeling sneaks up on you without announcing itself.
Sentimental Value
The Bottom Line
Genuine sentiments, fully earned.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Anders Danielsen Lie
Director: Joachim Trier
Screenwriters: Joachim Trier, Eskil Vogt
2 hours 12 minutes
There are faint traces of Bergman in Sentimental Value, but also Chekhov and Ibsen, pulled into a contemporary world where they deepen our understanding of history and memory in relation to the characters. With grace and empathy, it explores the volatile power of art and the cost of making highly personal work, to artists and to the people they have hurt.
That aspect is amplified by the living, breathing presence of an Oslo family home, a place that looks like a fairytale cottage, nestled among the soothing greens of the garden and looking onto expansive views of the city. But it’s also a fortress of sorrow, of pain remembered, embedded in its walls.
Renate Reinsve, the luminous star of The Worst Person in the World, plays Nora, an acclaimed stage actress who pours her anxieties into her taxing roles. As a child, she wrote an essay for class about her family’s house and the history it contains of people who lived there before her, precociously attributing it sentient properties.
A hilarious early scene taps Reinsve’s natural gift for physical chaos comedy as Nora is gripped, not for the first time, by crippling stage fright. She misses her music cue (the portentous opening notes of The Shining’s main title theme) while having a full-scale meltdown and refusing to be coaxed by her director to go on. Kasper Tuxen’s agile camera follows her as she dashes from her dressing room to the backstage area, throwing herself at her fellow company member and married lover Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie, from Worst Person and earlier Trier films). Tearing at her costume and hair, she pleads with him to fuck her, or failing that, slap her. He opts for the latter.
At their mother’s wake, Nora is the calm one while her normally composed sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), an academic historian, is a mess. Retreating upstairs, Nora listens at the heating grate, just as she did as a child eavesdropping on her parents’ arguments or her therapist mother’s conversations with patients; she is startled to recognize the voice of her father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), an unexpected arrival.
A once lauded film director who hit a 15-year fallow patch, Gustav abandoned the family when the girls were young, moving to Sweden and divorcing their mother. The reunion is more than a little awkward. Further complicating matters is the fact that their mother got the house after the divorce, but the papers were never signed, meaning Gustav now owns it.
Trier and his longtime co-writer Eskil Vogt draw us in quickly to the family dynamic, establishing the sly ripples of humor that run through even the darker scenes.
Gustav tells Nora he needs to speak with her while he’s in town, later showing her a script that he says might be the best thing he’s ever written and a great comeback for him as a director. He offers her the lead role of a young mother, transparently based on his own mother’s tragic story, though he denies it.
Nora wants no part of the movie or of him, calling him a drunk who has caused the family nothing but pain. She adds that he has never shown much interest in her work and barely even seen her on stage, which he justifies without apology by saying he doesn’t care for theater.
This is a marvelous role for Skarsgard, who gets to play up Gustav’s self-importance and lack of accountability along with his flirtatious charm as the movie progresses. The theater/film divide seems to confirm Nora’s view of him as the enemy. He doubles down on it later, confessing, “It’s not that I hate theater. I just hate watching it.” Sure enough, he then fails to show at her opening night.
Determined to go ahead with the film, he casts American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), whom he met while being honored at a film festival. She’s jaded with Hollywood and with the projects she has lined up, roles to which she feels no connection.
Rachel responds emotionally to a screening of the movie that put Gustav on the map many years back, a WWII drama about orphaned Jewish children trying to escape the Nazis that ends on a lingering closeup of a young girl’s haunted face.
That role was played by Agnes, who says the film shoot was the only time she ever got to be at the center of her father’s universe. When he approaches her about putting her son Erik (Oyvind Hesjedal Loven) in the new movie, she instantly refuses, though that doesn’t stop him from going around her to try convincing the boy what fun it would be. The DVD selections that he turns up with as a gift on his grandson’s ninth birthday are priceless. Less kid-friendly films would be hard to find.
Playing an egotist with a roguish appeal to which only his daughters are immune, Skarsgard stirs in wry humor (and a funny Netflix dig) about being an aging arthouse director whose success is behind him. He visits his longtime cinematographer Peter (Lars Väringer) in the swanky house paid for by his work on Lasse Hallström films. But during the 15 years since they last worked together, Peter retired; he’s keen to do the movie, but his frail physical state makes Gustav drop the offer. Gustav later asks his producer Michael (Jesper Christensen), “Am I too old for this?”
Trier and Vogt delicately layer in allusions to grief and sadness being passed down to successive generations, both in scenes Gustav rehearses with Rachel and archival records Agnes finds of her grandmother, who was tried for treason, imprisoned and tortured during the German occupation.
Despite the frequent touches of humor, the movie’s swirling mix of past and present builds pathos, yielding one of Trier’s characteristic stylized flourishes in which the faces of multiple generations wash over each other, staring into the camera as one person morphs into the next.
Around this time, Rachel starts to feel uncomfortable about doing the film, realizing it’s not her story to tell. In one of the movie’s loveliest scenes, she approaches Gustav about pulling out; he shows her more paternal fondness than he’s probably ever shown his daughters. Skarsgard is unexpectedly moving as Gustav acknowledges to himself the ways he failed his family, his arrogant certainty abruptly falling away.
There are gorgeous moments late in the movie between the sisters that indicate how their roles have switched since childhood. Nora looked after Agnes when they were girls, but Agnes now serves as protector of her more fragile sister, just as she took on caregiver responsibilities with their dying mother. As wonderful as Reinsve is, Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who’s mostly unknown outside Norway, matches her every emotional beat. “How did it happen?” Nora asks Agnes. “You turned out fine and I’m fucked up.”
Unlike the Hollywood version of this story — the kind of script Rachel Kemp might have passed on — there’s no neat and tidy reconciliation. But Trier keeps tricks up his sleeve that provide surprises and leave open a window just enough to let in a sliver of hope.
For what might have been a standard family melodrama in less capable hands, Sentimental Value is uncommonly rich in emotional rewards and contemplative in its reflections on the places where we live becoming a permanent repository for our memories, remaining there even after we move on. The movie’s poignancy accumulates gradually, every supple turn expertly modulated as the presence of generations past becomes more tangible.
Cinematographer Tuxon (who also shot Worst Person) takes great advantage of the crystalline Scandinavian light, giving the chamber piece a panoramic amplitude. As always, Trier makes beguiling music choices, deep cuts that gently help shape the mood — the way he did with the Harry Nilsson songs and Art Garfunkel’s “Waters of March” cover in Worst Person.
Here, he bookends the movie with two songs brimming with tenderness and warmth: Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl” and Labi Siffre’s “Cannock Chase.” Anyone whose soundtrack selections run from Roxy Music to Michael Nyman, New Order to Pastor T.L. Barrett & the Youth for Christ Choir, makes you want to score an invite to explore their album collection.
The whole cast is superb, but it’s especially gladdening to see Reinsve working again with a director who draws out every ounce of raw feeling in her, but also makes you think — even in this often dark and predominantly dramatic context — how good she might be in screwball comedy.
One scene comes to mind that’s just a delight, when Nora and Agnes are in the house sorting through things, deciding what they might want to take as keepsakes.
Nora chooses a vase that Agnes wanted and when they see Gustav arriving with Rachel through the window, Nora backs out of the room like a bad driver, almost smashing the vase but catching it in time, running out the back door, across the yard and through a gap in the fence still clutching it. As she walks briskly toward the camera it seems like perfect continuity with her character Julie running in The Worst Person in the World.
