★★★★★
Following up a film like The Worst Person in the World is a hard task. By far the height of his commercial and, I think it’s fair to say, critical success, Joachim Trier’s final instalment of his ‘Oslo Trilogy’ feels like the mastery of the type of film he has been making his whole career. I don’t think it would be a stretch, however, to say that Sentimental Value is a work that reaches even greater heights.
A significant factor which motivated Trier to make the film was the sale of his own family house, we were told in the introduction at Leeds Film Festival. Entering the film, the spectre of the domestic sphere already looms large in the audience’s mind. The opening reinforces this: the first thing Sentimental Value shows us is the history of a house. Inhabited by Nora (Renate Reinsve), it has been in her family for many generations. It belonged to Nora’s mother, but she died recently — prior to the events of the film and it is now the family home on her (largely absent) father’s side. One would probably expect a small film, then, a claustrophobic domestic drama perhaps. While the home is of central, astronomical narrative importance, this is not the case.
After this, we meet Nora in the backstage of a grand theatre. She refuses to come out of her room, seeming to be having a panic attack mere moments before she is supposed to lead in a play. The efforts of everyone working to get Nora on stage are comic, while at the same time, the scene is emotionally intense — Reinsve and Trier doing spectacular work to establish the fraught mental state of the character.
Trier shows us very efficiently that Nora avoids the emotional issues around her. Not only does she respond to her stage fright by not getting on stage, but she also asks her co-star (played by Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie), with whom she’s having an affair, to either initiate a romantic encounter with her or slap her to get her on stage. This severe lack of emotional reckoning follows her, and those around her, through the narrative.
This is especially true of her father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), an acclaimed director who left the family when Nora and her sister were very young. He returns back into his daughters’ lives at their mother’s funeral, not with reconciliation or comfort, but a script he wants Nora to star in. After she turns him down, the film shifts to focus more on Gustav than Nora for a while, following him to France where he is being honoured with some kind of lifetime achievement award. It is here he meets a young Hollywood star (Elle Fanning) and convinces her to join the film in place of his own daughter. Through these scenes we see Gustav’s immense charm: he is funny and likeable, as well as manipulative and very clearly a broken man.
This only becomes more clear when we learn the nature of the script he is working on, a family drama about a mother who kills herself. He insists the film isn’t about his own mother, isn’t autobiographical, and yet he insists on wanting to film it in the family home of the opening scene. He asks Elle Fanning’s character to dye her hair to resemble Nora’s, eventually even asking his own grandson to play the son’s character in the film.
The more the film goes on the more apparent it becomes that Gustav faces the same avoidance issues as his daughter. The film he is making is the only way he knows how to connect with his daughters and express some kind of guilt for his many years of absence. Skarsgård portrays all aspects of this character phenomenally. You fall for the bluster of his character, hate him in the way Nora must, and feel deeply sad for him. Even if it seems like Sean Penn’s performance in One Battle After Another will inevitably win Best Supporting Actor at this year’s Oscars, Skarsgård deserves the award for Sentimental Value.
Given how complex and multifaceted its characters are, Sentimental Value manages to balance them very well. Aside from Gustav and Nora, we also spend a lot of time with Agnes, Nora’s sister, wonderfully portrayed by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. With her settled family life, Agnes is initially set up as Nora’s mirror image, the sibling who has it together while the other is a mess. But Trier understands that those things are never so simple. Coming later in the film’s run time, Agnes takes on more and more of the heavy emotion of the film as well as becoming a bit of a channel for the tragic family history that haunts all of them, as well as the central house.
In one of the most affecting scenes of the film, we see Agnes at a library finding their files on her grandmother, Gustav’s mother. I won’t spoil it (as much as you can spoil a film like this) but this scene unlocks so much of the history of the family and so much of the emotional core of the film which comes spilling out in the last twenty minutes or so.
While I’ve specifically shouted out Skarsgård, every single performance in this feels like a career best. Elle Fanning does very unselfish work as the actress cast in the wrong role in this film-within-a-film; she is there to allow others to make breakthroughs and does it brilliantly. Lilleaas as Agnes does similar work, portraying someone moving through life while quietly struggling subtly and impressively, especially for an actress who has relatively little experience.
What Sentimental Value manages to do by the end of its run-time is feel like a film about a whole family. Not one character is privileged or given the audience point-of-view, they all shine as much as any other and their problems intertwine. Even beyond this central trio, the use of the family home manages to evoke the feeling that we are learning about many generations in a way that feels both sprawling and neatly contained (in terms of storytelling that is, the emotion is anything but).
Sentimental Value is pretty easily my favourite film of the year, even amongst very stacked competition, and I have been desperate to see it again since its release. It feels like a film that will only grow with time for me, but even after seeing it once it has been swirling around my head for days. It is a genuine triumph on almost every conceivable level.
