Following a failed father and filmmaker attempting to connect with his daughters by turning the former family home into a set, Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” is a subtle yet sweeping tapestry of art, family and connection that takes the breath away. Assisted by outstanding performances across the board — especially from Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”) and Stellan Skarsgård (“Andor”) — Trier has made a movie about movies that strikes right at the heart of the artform.
He does so not with one big blow, but in the steady accumulation of emotional gut punches that offer deep reflections about what it means to create art from a life that is not nearly as neatly packaged as what’s on screen. It’s a rich text, but a focused one, letting the gradual power of what it’s exploring gradually sneak up on you until you are completely swept up in the vision. What “The Fabelmans” represented for Steven Spielberg, “Sentimental Value” represents for Trier as it sees him engaging with the idea of film as a shield and a mirror, pondering the impact of mining personal relationships for your work.
Premiering Wednesday in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, “Sentimental Value” starts with an effectively poetic monologue that tells us all about the Oslo home where we spend much of the film. The visuals accompanying the monologue are perfectly shot by Kasper Tuxen with an eye for the small details of everyday life and childhood that become troubled by the pain of parental discord. We then jump forward in time to this same house where the Berg sisters, Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), are holding a reception following their mother’s funeral. An already painful experience is complicated by the arrival of their estranged father. Gustav (Skarsgård) is not a blatantly cruel man, but we soon begin to see in small moments the casually unkind things he says about his children.
Gustav is also a well-known filmmaker who hasn’t worked in years but hopes to make one last film — and he wants Nora, a beloved stage actress to star in it. She declines, and Gustav instead casts a young Hollywood star named Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). What was already a fraught relationship between Gustav and Nora then grows increasingly more so with the former trying to make a film that no longer makes sense without his daughter while the latter keeps her distance to preserve the life she has built for herself.
Trier, working from a sharp script he co-wrote with his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt, strikes a delicate balance between both character and theme as one works excellently in service of the other. As we cut between the patriarch remaining so dead set on trying to get his production off the ground that he will compromise fundamental parts of himself to do so and Nora seeking something approaching peace in her relationship with her father, we come to know both of them so fully that it hurts. Trier is never judgmental of either as he instead uses every scene to cut into another, deeper layer of their respective psyches.
They are both hurting in their own ways, but neither is able to articulate that to the other. Each is like a ship passing in the night, gently drifting further and further away until the shared current that is their love of their art begins to draw them back together. The film is also frequently witheringly funny about said art, taking shots at the rise of streaming and its impact on cinema just as it mourns what is being lost in the process. There is also a delightful joke surrounding movies given to Agnes’ son that are the furthest from kid-friendly though allow for a small moment of warmth between the adults as they chuckle over the picks. That doesn’t mean this isn’t a painful journey we’re on, but it also shows how art, much of which drove the characters apart, may be the only thing that saves them.
In one simple yet shattering visual moment near the end that encapsulates all of this, we see Gustav wandering through the now almost entirely empty family home from the outside looking in. Through his own desire to make one more film about life and his family, he has drained all of it from the home while driving them away. The shelves are empty and the silence deafening, making it already resemble a set more than it does a real place that people once inhabited.
When this is then taken even further in the appropriately emotionally thorny ending, which is built around an unexpected destruction, the subsequent recreation, and a fraught catharsis, everything falls perfectly into place. It creates a profound emotional resonance that most filmmakers would spend a lifetime chasing where, in one key look exchanged between father and daughter that Trier lets play out silently, the film’s power comes in how they finally see each other.
