As a director, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) likes to turn questions about characters’ motivations back on his actors.
That’s true, at least, in the case of Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a Hollywood it girl whose admiration for Borg’s work leads her to accept a part in the Norwegian director’s new passion project. She just can’t understand why her character is so bottomlessly sad.
Borg knows his film isn’t going to answer that question for Kemp, or for his audience. It’s enough, he apparently believes, for a film merely to pose questions about the human experience.
Although Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a more conventional piece of storytelling than Borg’s film-within-a-film seems to be, it’s similar in being content to observe. Having harmed his daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) emotionally, he pays her back in the most valuable currency he has: the ability to create an onscreen character that might make her feel uniquely seen.
Trier, who wrote the film with Eskil Vogt, lets viewers see that for all his impact upon Nora’s life, Gustav is not the alpha and omega of her triumphs and tribulations. Despite anxiety attacks, Nora works hard at her successful acting career. She remains single, perhaps in part because it’s difficult for her to trust but also because dating is hell.
In a key scene shared between Reinsve and, as Nora’s sister Agnes, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, the film suggests that Nora shielded her sister from the worst effects of their parents’ troubled marriage. The film also establishes Gustav’s history as a child marked by the horrors of World War II, indicating that the family’s trust issues didn’t emerge from nowhere.
The film is largely set in the family’s Oslo house, which has been in the family for generations and has pulsed with love and grief. It’s a ready-made symbol for the family’s emotional baggage, but Trier handles that symbolism with a light, deft touch. The characters understand they have to let the past become the past, but that’s not only a matter of looking to the future — they have to understand how to do so without betraying their earlier selves.
For a movie with so much to chew on, Sentimental Value moves with brisk efficiency as Trier finds moment after moment of gentle emotional truth. Nothing is wasted — certainly not Lilleaas, who has garnered acclaim for the less showy of the two sister roles. A lesser film would paint Agnes as the “successful” daughter, but Trier shows us how a happy marriage and beloved child don’t solve past problems; rather, Agnes faces her own set of hard choices when her father comes back into her life.
Sentimental Value is also a film about filmmaking, one that points to the balance of craft and inspiration required for a really satisfying product. That points the viewer to a nuanced appreciation of not just Sentimental Value as a whole but of the performances onscreen: Skarsgård’s weary charisma, Reinsve’s haunted relationship with the very act of stepping onstage.
Both characters make art because it helps them to understand themselves, but it also has the potential to distract them from their own unresolved issues. Sentimental Value balances on that very edge: between entertainment and insight, between letting go and digging in. In the end, the fates of the film and the house and the inhabitants of each are resolved as Trier pulls back to a long shot worth savoring.
Images courtesy Neon
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