Review: SENTIMENTAL VALUE

 by Rob DiCristino

Or: The Worst Father in the World.

“It’s not my mother in the script,” writer/director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) assures his young ingénue (Elle Fanning as Rachel) as she wrestles with the gravity of her character’s suicide. Gustav is telling her the truth, at least most of it; Rachel’s character may share his mother’s fate — and they may happen to be rehearsing in the same room where she hanged herself — but this woman has more in common with his eldest daughter, the cold, detached Nora (Renate Reinsve), than with the mother who left him behind all those years ago. Then again, there’s a bit of his younger daughter, the more dutiful, upright Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), in her as well. Even with these obvious connections, though, the aging auteur insists that this project is not autobiographical. This is not the story of his life. Then what, Rachel has to ask, is it? A way to process his absent fatherhood? Consolation for abandoning his daughters until his ex’s death opened the door to creative rebirth? No, maybe Gustav is right: Maybe this script isn’t an autobiography. Maybe it’s an apology.

Will anyone hear it, though? Gustav may be an established cinematic master, but his last notable project is over fifteen years old. His first choice for the lead of this new one — theater star Nora — refuses to even read the script. Hollywood It Girl Rachel is eager to step in, believing the role will help establish her bona fides as a Serious Actor, but is she really right for it? What about Agnes, who played a key part in one of her father’s best films when she was just a child? No, she’s left the art life behind, retreating to quiet domesticity with her husband, Evan (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud), and their son, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven). It’s Nora, then. It has to be! But Nora knows better than to share her creative life with this man, a life spent embodying characters who protect her from all the damage he’s done. The only way forward, then, is to make Nora understand. Gustav must make her see why this film should be made, why it’s the key to unlocking the decades of trauma that have doomed them both to this fickle, frustrating path of artistic insecurity.

Succinct yet sprawling, heartbreaking yet invigorating, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a masterful examination of both the transcendent power of creativity and its hopeless impotence, of the ways in which artistic works that appear at first to be gushing arteries of vulnerability can actually be exercises in cowardice, instruments meant to bury, conceal, and obfuscate the very emotions they’re purporting to expose. Opening with a moving stanza personifying the Borgs’ ancestral home — “She wondered if the house liked to be empty and light or full and heavy. If the floors liked being trod on. If the walls were ticklish” — Trier’s film explores the lingering family resentments that have spread like cracks in its foundation, the “noise” it endured during Gustav’s marriage, and how it gave way to a haunted silence once he moved out for good. That silence lives on in Nora and Agnes, both of whom know better than to expect any reconciliation from a father who would have to acknowledge his mistakes —fat chance — before he could ever atone for them.

But isn’t this project a bid for that very reconciliation? Aren’t Gustav’s desperate pleas to bring his daughters together — as well as his grandson, whom he’s recruited to play himself as a young boy — actually attempts to synthesize their shared grief into something cathartic? Can’t they join him in this interrogation of his childhood’s defining moment, support him as his creative life resolves itself — in what he calls a “perfect sync between time and space” — in front of their very eyes? Perhaps. But for Nora, who self-medicates with married men and suicidal ideation, this would mean a literal breaking of the fourth wall, a dissolution of the proscenium barriers she’s created to insulate all her frayed nerves and loose wires. It would take trust and sacrifice, an acknowledgement of her own deep-seated longing for her father’s approval — About her cheesy TV series, she tells him: “It’s not about what other people think of it. What do you think of it?” — and an admission of her own weakness, that which she could only have learned by watching him.

Sentimental Value’s screenplay — co-written by Trier and longtime partner Eskil Vogt — will eventually bring its characters closer to that catharsis, but it’s magnificent performances from Stellan Skarsgård and Worst Person in the World standout Renate Reinsve that make it one of the best and most emotionally incisive films of the year. Both actors are in perfect sync with Trier’s subdued, lyrical approach to characterization, his affinity for catching his characters mid-thought and holding his camera on them until they’re forced to follow those thoughts through to coherent, often wordless conclusions. Coupled paradoxically with his other signature element — interspersed voice-over narration, provided here by Bente Børsum — it makes for a mode of storytelling that borders on inferential, a cinematic experience defined by our ability to read between lines that blur and separate at the slightest shift in a subject’s posture or eyeline. In that way, Joachim Trier’s films are like his characters’ memories: Delicate but devastating, transient but unforgettable.

Sentimental Value hits U.S. theaters on Friday, November 7th.