Joachim Trier’s drama about two daughters confronted with the father who abandoned them uses acting as a symbol of the ways adult children navigate their families.
The premise of Sentimental Value, the new movie by Norwegian director Joachim Trier, has a classic simplicity, similar to some of Ingmar Bergman’s films about families. Two sisters cope with their difficult father when he returns to the scene after the death of their mother. The challenge of dramatizing such dynamics is to make it fresh, to explore new angles of an age-old situation. Trier, and his regular co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt have done that, by infusing the family story with ideas about acting and what it takes for performers to energize their work using the feelings and issues in their personal lives.
A brief prologue provides “back story.” In a lovely old house in Norway, two sisters, Nora and Agnes, were fiercely bonded together against the background of a home in conflict. By opening an old stove in their room, they could hear their parents fighting downstairs. Their father was a fairly well-known film director. Their mother is distinguished in this film by her absence—we never see her, a significant decision in this movie.
Nora, the older sister, played by Renate Reinsve, becomes an actress on the stage and TV. After the prologue, a tense and also quite funny sequence shows her having a terrible attack of stage fright before a theater performance. The director, the assistants, and her co-star all try to calm her nerves down, but she’s constantly avoiding going on stage, even when the intro music has already started playing. Everyone’s panicking, minutes are ticking by—after a nerve-wracking ordeal, she finally goes and gives a great performance. Now, by starting the story this way, Trier is driving home the sheer power needed to perform authentically. He’s also emphasizing the neurotic personality of this central character. Reinsve was the star in Trier’s very successful film from a few years ago The Worst Person in the World. She’s the anchor in this movie, in a role that requires a difficult degree of interior suffering that is not often expressed in words.
The younger sister Agnes is played by the very capable Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Agnes is married, with a little boy—she’s taken a different path from Nora, but the bond is still there. At their mother’s funeral, their father Gustav—played by the great Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård—arrives unexpectedly, and stays at the old house for a while. Nora and Agnes are obviously wary of him, Nora especially. Later he tells her that he’s written a script that he wants to film with her in the lead role. She refuses.
Much later at a film festival in France, he meets a young movie star played by Elle Fanning, and asks her to take the role. She agrees. But here I must stop myself, because this is the kind of film that makes me to want to tell the whole story, which a film reviewer shouldn’t do. Each development of character and story in the film is so interesting, and branches out into territory even more interesting, that I have to resist the temptation to tell you more, and let you experience it yourself.
Gustav is a complex and often arrogant person who can’t see the damage he’s done unless he expresses it in a film, and Skarsgård is perfectly in his element. Don’t expect sentimentality here. Trier means to face squarely the pain of neglected children coping with parents as adults. The title, Sentimental Value, comes from a passing comment about dividing up the mother’s estate. The film is a beautiful and moving journey of grief and love.
