Nora Borg is a really good stage actress. She is celebrated for it, commended on it, and she can fully engage her audience. But she is incredibly uncomfortable in the theatre, she suffers bouts of anxiety and stage fright that threaten opening nights. It is an inconvenience to say the least. One might think she could transition away from the medium into film and television where her subtle emotional performance style would also be more welcome. But one gets the sense she can’t do that -to move into movies and television is to move into the realm of her father, and that would make her ten times more uncomfortable.
The intricacies of this estrangement, both spoken about and alluded to, is the pillar that Joachim Trier builds his astounding new movie Sentimental Value on. A movie about fractured family relationships, family history, and the uneasy work of turning life and trauma into art, it is among the most tender and quietly moving films I’ve seen in recent years -a trait it shares with its elder sibling The Worst Person in the World, though substituting that film’s bouts of wry comedy with wounded drama.
You might not know it at first, with a narration device (provided by veteran Norwegian actress Bente Børsum) so formal it might as well be deadpan, delivering exposition on the Borg family and objective observations whenever the film focuses in on the family history. The family house in Oslo is a centrepiece, having been in the Borg family for generations, but was also the site of a great trauma in the childhood of Gustav, played by Stellan Skarsgård; one that now as a famous filmmaker he is looking to dramatize, with his estranged actress daughter Nora, played by Renate Reinsve, his hand-picked choice to star. But Nora, resentful of his absence through much of the childhood of her and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), refuses. Instead, Gustav strikes up an artistic kinship at Cannes with a popular young American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), and decides to cast her in the film while taking advantage of the house reverting back to his ownership in the aftermath of the death of his ex-wife, to shoot the whole movie there -still an important space in Nora and Agnes’s lives.
The relationship here between father and daughters feels intimately real and raw. Agnes, who is married and has her own young son, is more sympathetic to Gustav and open to cultivating a new relationship possibly for the sake of her son. But she is notably cautious. As a child she had a role in one of his acclaimed films -an enjoyable experience but one that broke her heart when it ended and he was once again out of the picture. The thrill of being part of his art was an important touchstone for her, but it does not substitute a real relationship. She naturally gets incredibly agitated then when he starts courting her son for a similar part -he can’t see the pain it caused for Agnes. But that is the baseline for Nora’s relationship with him.
Trier doesn’t convey outright the nuances of what Nora has gone through with her dad, even with the narration device and the perhaps subtle insinuation that she pursued acting out of a desire to be closer to her father only to now have seemingly the complete opposite feeling, exacerbated by his daring to make a movie drawn from their family history in a home he hasn’t lived in in ages. Of course there are multiple facets of resentment that tie into her everyday anxieties, relatable to many who even have healthier relationships with their parents. She gets along wonderfully with her nephew, and feels insecure about not having a family of her own yet -she is carrying out an affair with a colleague -played by Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie, Reinsve’s love interest from their prior collaboration- but it’s perhaps not as serious as she wishes. And these apparent shortcomings as well as a general disinterest in theatre as a medium (despite apparently loving her work) are amplified by her father, especially in a critical scene that illustrates perfectly their rift. Just the little comments and microaggressions dropped without thought by Gustav are so palpable -you can see the wounds being opened in each case.
But this is a movie about generational trauma, and we come to understand how much of an impact the family’s history has had -what Gustav’s mother Karin went through and subsequently how it effected him and his own relationships to his children. There’s a very powerful scene where Agnes goes to the library to look up the account of Karin’s experience as a prisoner during the Nazi occupation of Norway, that again stings so much for how real it is, the tangibility quietly overwhelming for Agnes. Gustav keeps his scars hidden as much as he can, but his particular lack of emotional connection to people and things has an explanation here. His tragedy is that he can only bring them out in his movies, which can be beautiful, but practically insufficient. Trier acknowledges the pitfall and the irony in that, of so dedicating a work of art to expressing deep feelings whilst not having the capacity to do so in one’s real life.
A lot of this is relayed with subtlety through an extraordinary set of performances that might be the highest concentration in a movie this year. Reinsve leads the pack with a once again achingly poignant portrait of a woman desperate for affection from people who can’t give it and burdened by deep frustrations and pains. It is a great parallel to her performance in The Worst Person in the World -someone more mature and put-together this time, whose turmoils are consequently a little bit deeper. Opposite her, perhaps there is just a little inherent magic in Skarsgård working with a Trier as he gives one of his best performances of confident arrogance matched with a weird touch of soulful honesty. Both Trier and Skarsgård draw him in a manner familiar of many a veteran European filmmaker (perhaps some that they know), and illustrate well that late-career pull toward nostalgia, as Gustav endeavours to recruit some of his old creative partners and naturally bristles at the mores of the modern film industry (Netflix is picking up this project, and Trier gets in a few deserving swipes at the streamer). Skarsgård plays Gustav as a haunted man in spite of himself, pursuing reconciliation with his family through art in a way that is both tragic and moving -it is apparently the only way he knows how. And there is a genuine connection felt between him and Rachel, unexpected of the director and his muse. On that, Fanning delivers strongly as well, making up a few of the movie’s lighter moments (such as her awkward attempt at a Scandinavian accent) but providing also an unexpectedly earnest heart when it comes to preserving Gustav’s art and vision. She never once comes off as the conceited Hollywood starlet doing a European film for cynical career reasons (as Chloe Grace Moretz played in The Clouds of Sils Maria); she is one of the warmest figures in the whole film. But perhaps the more immediate heart is in Agnes, whom Lilleaas plays with a groundedness that cannot be understated. She is incredibly necessary, not just as a bridge between Nora and Gustav, but as a vital stabilizer for Nora’s mental health and as a check on Gustav -her strength is so utterly admirable all throughout. And Lilleaas says more with less than anyone else in the movie bar none.
It is Agnes who is ultimately critical in breaking things through. In all the attention on the relationship Nora has to her father, it is the bond of the sisters that makes for the movie's most affecting scene, one of both moving commiseration and healing. Trier really demonstrates his tender side in this and other corners of the film, his intimate lens allowing for much freedom from the actors whilst accentuating their context and the film's dramatic atmosphere. Starkly he teases a scene from one of Gustav's past films, he pores over the library photos Agnes researches documentary-like, he includes a provocative abstract interlude melding the faces of Gustav, Nora, and Agnes together like something out of a Bergman film. But it is his language around the house that is particularly curious; honing in on the visual symbolism of an old oven through which one can listen to the goings-on in the neighbouring sitting room, shooting a flashback of Gustav's mother in a manner that Gustav himself envisions, or framing him outside from an upstairs window expressing his dissatisfaction. The house carries great sentimental value for each of the Borg family, though for different reasons -can that be understood and adapted? Its role in both the opening and closing of the film provides a clue.
A bittersweet film in the most direct of ways, Sentimental Value dwells stirringly in its tangible human drama with a power not fully grasped until sitting with it in its aftermath. It reckons with both the power and crutch of art as one's sole means of expression and makes its plea of connection in an earnest and fair way with respect to each affected party. The complexity of a family dynamic on captivating display. Trier's filmmaking remains quietly mesmerizing, his cast utterly astonishing -Reinsve is especially cemented as a unique talent in the modern movie space. Quintessentially, the family movie of the year.
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