Perhaps the highest praise I can give Sentimental Value is that, once the end credits finished rolling, I immediately wanted to leave the cinema, go home and spend the whole night writing about my family. Who are these strange, same-surnamed people? Why do I love unconditionally those who, by far, irritate and hurt me the most? And how do the shared memories – the childhood home full of junk and clutter that evokes in me the depths of a thousand fathoms of affection; the witnessed events, both joyous and shameful, and the entire generations of history in our name define who I am today?
These are the questions that Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier, four years after his global triumph The Worst Person in the World, asks and, through the powerful performances of its three leads and the tragic, intimate drama between them, forces us to ask ourselves. His new film tells the story of the Borg sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve, who also starred in TWPITW), a stage actress in her mid-30s who’s struggling with stage fright, and who’s having an affair with her married co-star (Anders Danielsen Lie, a long-time collaborator of Trier), and her younger sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), a mother, wife and academic historian in that order. When their mother dies, they believe they’ve inherited the family home, only to find that the deed still belongs to their negligent father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) who, after fifteen years of absence in Sweden, has returned to Oslo to ask Nora to star in his new film. When she refuses, he gives the role to Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a famous Hollywood actress who brings the necessary funding from Netflix. Once Rachel arrives to the Borg household, we begin to feel the crushing weight of Gustav’s absence and the family’s traumatic history on them.
As is typical for Trier, SV explores some very grand and difficult emotions – suicide, a deep rooted remorse rotting at our souls and how we yearn for connection with our families and lovers and our failed attempts at making them – with droll humour and reserved tenderness. He is evidently very curious about human psychology and his characters are never satisfied with who they are, nor are they explicit about what they’re missing. They don’t let their dreams cross over to reality but, in their waking hours of feigned content, they’re always quietly longing, searching, desperate to inhibit some other consciousness but theirs. It’s fitting that Nora is an actress and Gustav is a director, two roles that are symbiotic by nature, and like a father and a daughter, can’t exist without the other, and are often ignorant and even resentful of that fact. Reinsve and Skarsgård portray this conflict excellently.
There’s a sequence about halfway through the film, where we transition from a bitter argument between Nora and, all the more impactful from what they don’t say to each other, to Nora breaking down in tears on her bed, only to cut to her theatre company applauding her performance. Reinsve lets the innermost pain and sorrow of Nora flicker through her gaze. The drop of a brow. The sternness brewing in her eyes. She perfectly
captures a woman in her middle of her life who refuses to let on that it’s headed in the wrong direction, and who’s too lost and too afraid to change course. Skarsgård, for his part, may have given the crowning performance of his career. Gustav is a mulish, arrogant, talented but terribly insecure man, who knows he has far more years behind him than ahead, that he’s wasted most of them away from the people he truly cares about and who may not have enough time left to do what’s right, and Skarsgård infuses him with a gait that’s strides painfully over its stiffness and a guttural hesitation whenever a topic of conversation isn’t in his control. Lilleaas as Agnes, who is the most conventionally ‘normal’ and the least aggressive or stubborn one here, does a fine job of cutting through both their rubbish.
And the visual language of the film lends a very satisfying amount of space for these characters, much to the credit of DOP Kasper Tuxen who, from reading his interviews, has clearly devoted a lot of thought to balancing the relationship between the outer space of the camera and lighting to the inner-space of the character’s repressed emotions. The lighting is mostly natural and understated and the camera movements flow at a realistic pace but, much like the emotions of a repressed mind, there are the occasional forays into less Earthly, more hypnotic territory. Ironically, the film avoids being overly sentimental in the portrayal of its themes, which mostly works well, and there’s a narrated montage where the history of the Borg household from the early 20th century onwards unfolds before our eyes, shot on beautifully grainy, period-fitting 16mm film, that made me feel like I was keenly plying through a historical picturebook of a strange but utterly captivating family.
Really, my only criticism comes from the few times we venture away from the Borgs, which are where a lot of comedy from this tragicomedy arises and, sadly, falls flat, in part because of the language barrier (comedy arguably requires a lot more cultural knowledge to be effective than drama, whose themes are often more universal, and for a film as talkative as this one, the subtitle-barrier didn’t help, especially when the comedy isn’t directly connected to the Borg’s drama – when it is, it’s very funny; the IKEA stool bit and Gustav’s gifts to his grandson are a particular highlight.) But Trier’s commentary on the film industry, from the decline of DVDs to smug Yankee influences to ‘TikTok-troll’ journalism, while I basically all agree with, are far too cloying and, dare I say, sentimental, to warrant the detraction away from what makes the film really compelling.
But I certainly appreciate Trier’s love of the medium. The 35mm photography is beautiful, with the blushing of the character’s skin-tones wonderfully captured and the high-key lighting (very difficult to achieve on digital cameras) giving us a very authentic depiction of the grace of human connection. And, for the cinephiles out there, the film is laced with motifs. The way the story is structured around these people, and the rawness of their relationships, immediately evokes the works of John Cassavettes (I imagine Nora was heavily inspired by Gena Rowlands in Opening Night) and the humour is so reminiscent of Woody Allen that the supposedly ‘subtle’ visual nod to Another Woman in the beginning becomes laughably obvious.
Before going into Sentimental Value, I thought I loved the people I call my family and I never questioned why. After leaving, I asked a thousand questions about them, dissected every detail, relived every event I had lodged far away in my mind, and what did I find out at the end of it?
God, I really love these people.
4/5
Image Credits – The Movie DB
