By John Corrado
Sentimental Value is Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s followup to his 2021 modern classic The Worst Person in the World, reuniting him with that film’s star Renate Reinsve. If Worst Person was about a quarter-life crisis and searching for meaning in your twenties, Sentimental Value aims for something even more ambitious in scope.
Trier spans generations in his absorbing and very moving portrait of parents and children, grappling with deeper themes about the relationship between art and our personal lives, and how much artists put of themselves in their work. It’s fitting, then, that the lead characters in Trier’s latest film are an actor and a filmmaker.
Reinsve stars as Nora, a young actress who still harbours resentment towards her estranged father, the film director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), for walking out on her and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) when they were kids. Buried tensions are brought back to the surface when Gustav reappears, offering Nora the starring role in his latest screenplay. When she declines, an American movie star named Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) enters the picture.
This almost meta-textual, filmmaking aspect adds to the film’s cinematic impact. Trier’s film is rooted in this idea of performance, and what roles we are willing to take on. Early on, we follow Reinsve’s Nora through a backstage panic attack. It’s not really about that performance, but rather all of the events in her life leading up to it, causing her to have an emotional breakdown before taking the stage.
Trier is interested in the complexities of human emotion. The father who walked away, but isn’t really a bad guy, and maybe has more in common with his daughter than she would like to think. The power of Trier’s screenplay, which he once again co-wrote with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, is in how he has sympathy for each of his characters, in turn gifting each of the ensemble’s cast members with rich material.
Reinsve’s powerhouse performance as Nora, just as well-defined as her Julie in Worst Person in the World, allows her to go to some heavier dramatic places. Skarsgård delivers standout work as the father who dedicated himself to his artistic work at the expense of his family, now trying to make amends with his flesh and blood. Ibsdotter Lilleaas leaves her own quiet mark on the film as the more emotionally grounded sister, while Fanning gets her moments to shine as the American starlet trying to prove her worth through European cinema.
The title of Sentimental Value evokes the idea of the objects we carry with us throughout our lives, how physical spaces hold meaning, and the memories that we choose to capture through film. The film itself opens with a beautifully realized montage of Nora’s family home and the lives that have existed within it (think of it as the European answer to Here, the unfairly maligned Robert Zemeckis film from last year that I’m confident will enjoy a critical reevaluation in good time), using the idea of a childhood home as a sort of stage or film set.
Trier’s film itself feels like a perfect melding of European arthouse cinema and more American sensibilities. In telling this complex and emotionally thorny father-daughter story, Trier gets at something much deeper about how childhood memories shape what sort of adults we will become, and how those memories can be channeled and re-contextualized through cinema or performance.
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