I was introduced to Joachim Trier‘s films at a Scandinavian film festival a few years ago. Since then I have been following him and I try not to miss any of his films. Four years have passed between his previous movie – which I really liked – ‘The Worst Person in the World’ and ‘Sentimental Value‘ (original title is ‘Affeksjonverdi‘). When I heard that it had won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I knew that it must have been worth the wait. I have now seen the film and I was not disappointed. ‘Sentimental Value‘ is a beautiful and sensitive film, profound and well-constructed, about the art of making movies, about home and family and about old age. In the best tradition of quality Scandinavian films (and I am thinking especially of Ingmar Bergman) it asks questions about the place of art in today’s world and its power to heal personal traumas.
Gustav Borg is a great film director, but he has reached 70 years of age and has not made a feature film in 15 years. When his ex-wife dies, he returns to the house he left decades ago, a house that remained his property. On this occasion, he reunites with his two daughters, who are very different in destiny and character. Nora, a talented and devoted theater actress, is constantly struggling with stage fright and the uncertainties of an unfulfilled personal life. Agnes is a history researcher and seems happily married, living with her husband and a son who is turning ten. Gustav brings with him a film script. Like his previous success, perhaps his most famous film made many years ago, the subject is related to the family history, more precisely to his mother who committed suicide, possibly as a result of the trauma of detention and torture during the Nazi occupation. The director tries to offer the role to Nora, but she refuses. Is the father who abandoned his family and the two girls trying to win them back by joining his project? In Nora’s place, he casts Rachel, a young and talented American actress who comes from a very different film school. Will Gustav Borg make this film, perhaps his last major film? What impact will the film project have on the relationships in the family that seemed to have long been broken? What role does the family’s history and the house where several generations have lived, which Gustav wants to turn into a film set, play in all of this?
These are some of the questions that crossed my mind while watching. Other viewers will, of course, notice other details and ask themselves other questions. Not all of them will get explicit answers, and that’s good. Joachim Trier (who is also a co-writer of the script) has built four complex and real characters, whom the audience gets to know and whose problems they will understand and perhaps identify with some of them. The setting plays an important role. The house, perhaps typically Scandinavian, becomes a kind of small Hitchcockian mansion, where the lives and deaths of the family members unfold, and which gradually reveals some of its secrets. Stellan Skarsgård makes of Gustav another formidable role, one of those that propelled him among the leading actors of his generation in the world. Renate Reinsve, who had played the lead role in Joachim Trier‘s previous film, returns here as Nora and is excellent, as is Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who plays Agnes, Nora’s sister. The hand of aces (three of them being she-aces) is completed by Elle Fanning, who plays the role of the young American star, excited to be cast in a film by a famous European director and experiencing the confrontation not only of two acting or cinema styles but also of two ways of seeing life. ‘Sentimental Value‘ is a film that allows for multiple interpretations and points of view. I recommend watching it and urge you to pay special attention to two scenes – the one that opens the film and the one that ends it. Through two subtle yet different procedures, Joachim Trier introduces us at the beginning into the setting in which the film’s story unfolds and extracts us from it throwing us back into the real world at the end. However, the characters and their problems will stay with us beyond the screening time.