In the opening scene of Joachim Trier’s glorious new film Sentimental Value, the actress Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) is preparing to go onstage for a performance at the National Theatre in Oslo. As the orchestra plays the thundering ancient melody of the Dies Irae (think the opening theme of The Shining), the young woman is struck by a case of stage fright so severe it soon becomes a full-on panic attack. Paralyzed with fear, she hides in her dressing room, trying to tear off her costume and head mic. After members of the crew talk her down and the stage manager leads her through a breathing exercise, she finally makes it to the wings, but on the point of making her entrance, she retreats to her dressing room again in terror. She even tries to get a fellow cast member, Jakob (Trier’s longtime male lead Anders Danielsen Lie)—as we later learn, a married man with whom she’s having an on-and-off affair—to have some quick psych-up sex with her backstage and, when he refuses, asks him to slap her. When she at last makes her way onto the stage, there are a few sickening seconds of silence before she is able to speak the play’s first line.
This whole sequence of events plays out so exactly like an actor’s worst nightmare that I was convinced it would end with a cut to the character waking up in a cold sweat. But no, this is real life for Nora, an accomplished artist who struggles with clinical depression and resists real romantic intimacy. She’s a hot mess, but a charmingly relatable one, a combination of qualities that anyone who appreciated Reinsve’s equally luminous performance in Trier’s breakout film, the Oscar-nominated 2021 sort-of-rom-com The Worst Person in the World, should recognize. In Sentimental Value, Trier pulls the camera out from that movie’s intimate character study to give us a more panoramic view of life in Norway’s capital city: the life of a family over multiple generations, all centered on a house that, after Nora, is the second major character we meet.
The Borg family home is a snug red-and-green-painted bungalow surrounded by a leafy garden, as picturesque as a gingerbread cottage in a vintage children’s book. But the house is also a place that has known its share of suffering, as established by a flashback montage of the home’s past that briskly but deftly sketches four generations of Borg family history, ending on the troubled childhood of Nora and her younger sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who grew up listening to their parents’ epic fights through the walls. Their father, Gustav (Stellan Skårsgard), an acclaimed filmmaker, deserted the family and moved to Sweden when the girls were young; since then he’s been semi-estranged from his daughters, especially the sterner and less forgiving Nora. Agnes, now an academic historian with a husband and a 9-year-old son, has remained in somewhat closer touch with her father but is also ambivalent about his sudden return after the girls’ mother, whom we catch only glimpses of in flashback, dies. The now-70-year-old Gustav has returned to the old family home to renew ties with his daughters, yes—but, as we soon learn is typical for Gustav, he also wants something from them.
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In Nora’s case, that something is that Gustav wants to cast her as the lead in his upcoming film—his most autobiographical project yet, and the one that he hopes will be his comeback after a 15-year hiatus. The scene in which he proposes this idea in a café, only to be coldly turned down by a daughter who points out he has seldom even bothered to go and see her work onstage, is one of the movie’s sharpest, establishing this father-daughter pair as a matched set of dueling artistic egos, each defending their preferred medium.
The always extraordinary Skårsgard has rarely had a chance to play a character this rich in contradictions. Gustav is a rampant narcissist who truly believes he can defend having ignored his daughter’s successful stage career with the excuse that he just doesn’t care for theater. But he’s also a passionately committed artist who’s capable of exuding great charm and real warmth—especially, as both sisters seem painfully aware, when he’s around people who aren’t his immediate family. At a film festival in France, he meets a young movie star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), with whom he forms a genuinely paternal and noncreepy bond. When she expresses admiration for an old movie from his directing heyday, he offers her the part that was to go to Nora, and she comes to Oslo to begin rehearsing the role in the now-empty family home—which, to Nora and Agnes’ displeasure, is also where Gustav plans to shoot the movie.
Working from a script co-written with his long-standing collaborator Eskil Vogt, Trier establishes a web of complex relationships with minimal expository dialogue. Though it’s only two hours and 13 minutes long, Sentimental Value packs a whole novel’s worth of emotional texture and telling visual detail into that run time; you leave feeling as if you’ve witnessed multiple generations of one family’s life, observing the way behavior patterns and trauma get passed down. Occasionally we hear a third-person voice-over from an unknown woman whose deep knowledge of the family’s history suggests that the perspective may be that of some long-ago Borg ancestor. (She’s played by the 91-year-old Bente Børsum, who starred in The Chasers, a 1959 film directed by Trier’s own grandfather.) The direction moves with remarkable fluidity among styles, stitching together needle drops from many genres (1970s pop, jazz, classical) over visual techniques that range from naturalistic handheld camera to dreamlike montage.
Late in the film, when Nora is undergoing a mental health crisis, there’s a long close-up in which three faces—Nora’s own, her sister’s, and their father’s—meld into one another in a series of dissolves, each set of features blurring and distorting as it’s replaced by the next. There’s an evident homage here to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, with its strangely unsettling close-up of a woman’s face that combines one-half of the face of each of the film’s lead actresses, suggesting that their characters have begun to merge into one. But Trier’s three-face dissolve invokes a very different response from Bergman’s split-screen effect. Rather than suggesting the erasure or blending of the subjects’ identities, Trier’s image invites the viewer to think about their cross-generational similarities and differences, the way their histories both are and aren’t the same. In Nora’s unmoored mental state, we are led to understand, she is rebuilding from the ground up her sense of who she, her father, and her sister were to each other in the past and who they might become in the future.
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In trying to describe the structure of Sentimental Value, a film I’ve now watched twice in order to figure out how it was put together, I find myself envisioning the layers not of an onion but of a cabbage: The film’s chapters, set off from one another by black screens, fold into each other like so many curved leaves, forming a tightly nested whole. As he patiently unpeels these layers, Trier at times makes surprising gestures toward metanarrative: Scenes that we thought were taking place in real life turn out to be a part of Nora’s theatrical rehearsals, or a clip from one of Gustav’s old movies. In the end, what the director pulls off—aided by a splendid ensemble cast and a crew that includes his frequent cinematographer Kasper Tuxen, a master at filming the liquid light of Oslo—is a meditation on familial strife, the possibility of forgiveness, and the struggle to live a creative life without forgetting how to be a daughter, a father, a sister, a person capable of loving and being loved.
