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In director Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, several threads that might otherwise feel disparate are made to work in beautiful tandem. The Norwegian director’s follow-up to The Worst Person In the World — a great film about millennial malaise — brings lead actress Renate Reinsve back to the fore in a radically different, but no less touching and hilarious work about a great many things. It’s about fathers and daughters who can’t communicate, about physical spaces holding onto memory, and about the very process of pouring yourself into art in a desperate attempt to stay afloat. The result is bittersweet, self-reflexive cinema that reveals an immensely powerful portrait of anguish, and of re-building one’s sense of self.
The movie follows thirty-something sisters Nora (Reinsve), a stage actress, and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), an academic researcher, shortly after their mother dies, and their estranged father, the esteemed filmmaker Gustav Borg (a thorny Stellan Skarsgård), re-enters their lives. In a seeming attempt to reconnect with Nora, Gustav presents her with a script written with her in mind. “It’s about a mother,” he says before trailing off, unable to bring himself to say it’s about his mother. When Nora refuses to play the part, Gustav casts the up-and-coming Hollywood starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), leading to a film (and a film-within-a-film) of understated emotional quests, as the characters begin searching for answers to questions they can barely verbalize.
Before diving into this amusing plot, Trier introduces the history of the family’s century-old, two story home in a manner akin to layered fairytale. An older woman’s voiceover narrates the thoughts and feelings of a much younger Nora, in vivid and literary detail, as she describes her house as a living being responding to the many joyful sounds contained within its walls — and the many fights between her parents, leading to Gustav’s departure. It’s as though Nora herself were penning a memoir far in the future. However, this is something the movie never cares to clarify, and rightly so, since later vignettes told in similar fashion switch subjects and points of view.
This fable-like unveiling soon gives way to a more straightforward and grounded introduction, of a now-adult Nora waiting to go on stage to perform a period piece for an eager, affluent crowd. As she waits in her green room backstage, we see that it’s curiously constructed like a house with no roof, or perhaps a film set, both reflecting an incomplete facsimile of a once idyllic past, and portending the strange events to come. However, before she can take the spotlight, a panic attack sets off a hilarious comedy-of-errors against a ticking clock, as she’s chased helter-skelter by her stage crew.
The rapid-fire dialogue hints that this isn’t the first time Nora has suffered such an episode (or even the worst instance, she insists), but before she and the film can deal with her unraveling mental health, the plot jumps quickly forward to the complications posed by Gustav’s offer. Before long, a third kind of visual language emerges, as old clips from Gustav’s movie — among them a holocaust drama starring Agnes as a child — provide a sense of his tremendous and empathetic artistry. This classically-composed archival footage, and the aforementioned layered voiceover scenes, appear only briefly, but their hazy texture makes them feel like dreamlike segues from the film’s otherwise observant and naturalistic telling.
Before long, the focus of both these imagined asides shifts towards Gustav’s mother, and her past as someone who both resisted Nazi occupation, and suffered the consequences (his new film turns out to require both his daughters’ skills). Together, the movie’s three cinematic forms — the fabled, the cinematic, and the literal — paint a complete and complex picture of the family’s history, and the way its gaping wounds have festered. In reality, they’ve yielded frayed emotional connections, and an inability to communicate, or feel remotely whole. On screen, in Gustav’s movies, they’ve resulted in heartrending images. This contradiction further comes to light the more we glimpse Gustav’s rehearsals with Rachel, a proxy with whom he can finally be a gentle father-figure, as she’s eager to improve, and to please him. As a director, he’s kind, patient, and understanding, and has a clarity of vision. But as a father — a real father — his motives and feelings are obfuscated by a selfish fog. He seems keenly aware of the distance he creates between himself and his daughters, but after decades of leaving them behind in search of his next project, it’s a cycle he refuses to break.
Photo: Cannes Film FestivalThe way this manifests for each daughter is wildly different, too. The younger, well-adjusted Agnes, who’s married and has an adorable seven-year-old son, refuses all form of confrontation with him. Ibsdotter Lilleaas is quietly explosive in her supporting part, performing with her eyes as she waits in anticipation for things to eventually go wrong again, as though she can’t stop them. However, it’s Reinsve’s role as Nora that nudges the film into soul-stirring territory, with her sense of pose, reserve, and subtly shattering disappointment (in Gustav, and in herself). Often captured though uneven shadows cast by tree leaves, Nora slowly but surely crumbles inward in measured close ups, drawing both the camera and the viewer’s eye, pulling us into her orbit so magnetically that by the time we fully realize Nora is a black hole of self-loathing — which is to say, by the time we recognize the deep unease Trier has been making us feel — it’s far too late to back away. The movie’s sense of overwhelming despair creeps in gradually, and unexpectedly, before living beneath your skin, a sensation enhanced by its insistence on unfolding within the confines of a home defined by tumultuous memories.
This cinematic sleight of hand propels Sentimental Value to not just one of the most affecting works at Cannes, but one of year’s best and most powerful films. It radiates an anxious energy, alongside good intentions that slowly reveal the hellish road along which they’re paved, as each actor pushes against the invisible emotional blockades preventing their characters from healing. Gustav, a difficult artist, may just have found a cheat code to accessing some of his own emotions in the form of his script, but Trier portrays the difficulties of making a truly liberating film in the streaming era — Gustav comes up against some amusing hurdles — as well as the dueling usefulness and danger of turning to art as therapy. For Gustav, and for Nora, the answers to their lifelong despondency lies not in one easy place, but in a multitude of minor confrontations, both with each other — sometimes in silence, while smoking on their patio — and with themselves. Few films about the vicious cycles of trauma have been as rigorous, intimate, or compelling.
Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha) is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.
English (US)