Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad
Films about the travails of making films and novels about the toils of being a novelist have to be very good to seem worthwhile to those not in the business. Mia Hansen-Løve’s self-reflexive Bergman Island just about passed the test, but still left me feeling it would be good if creatives could leave off creating about being creatives. Any outline of the plot of Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s follow-up to The Worst Person in the World (2021), might seem almost a deliberate provocation to anyone sharing this prejudice.
Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård, no less), a distinguished, elderly Norwegian film director who has not made a feature for 15 years, turns up unexpectedly at the family home in Oslo after the funeral of the wife he abandoned along with his two daughters many years before. These daughters, Nora (the wonderful Renate Reinsve, heroine of The Worst Person in the World) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, almost as good), have grown up without ever forgiving him.
While Agnes has opted for the security of marriage, motherhood and academia, Nora has become a theatre actress, suffering greatly from stage fright but able to release in this way all the pent-up rage and hurt she otherwise refuses to confront.
Gustav announces he has written a script about the family and its history. He wants to film it in the fine family house and for Nora to star, telling her he wrote it for her and she’s the only one who can play the part. She refuses even to look at it.
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Undeterred, Gustav recruits a young American star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), to take the role, with Netflix to provide the financing. To her credit, Kemp eventually realises she is not right for the part and steps back. Agnes reads the script and thinks it’s great, not at all what she expected, showing such an understanding of their life it’s as if their father had been there as they went through the worst of it. She persuades Nora to take a look.
By the power of his art, Gustav achieves reconciliation; through its truth, he becomes close once again to his estranged family and recuperates some of the loss his career ambition inflicted. Reduced to this summary – another film about the costs and rewards of filmmaking – it sounds like one to skip. But Sentimental Value (written with Trier’s regular collaborator, Eskil Vogt) is unmissable. It’s terrifically well made and acted, a film with a texture to match the best of Éric Rohmer’s Moral Tales. Trier’s picture is an investigation into generational trauma that is extraordinarily involving and moving, fully meriting the Grand Prix (second prize) it won at Cannes this year.
In The Worst Person in the World, Trier took a deliberately novelistic approach, with a narrative voiceover running simultaneously with the action and division into chapters. Here, the voiceover (by the 91-year-old actor Bente Børsum) is more partial, seeming to come from a remote perspective in time (the family’s past life in the house?), the chapters marked just by moments of black screen. But the ambition to rival, if not surpass, the density and scope of a great novel remains – and no writing can give us the facial expressions, spatial awareness, framings and sound design that Trier uses so well to realise the story. He attends to faces with a patience that’s revelatory, makes the family home a living witness to their history.
He has brought out of Stellan Skarsgård perhaps his best ever performance, as the testy patriarch who finds his family in his filmmaking more than in person – irascible but also increasingly vulnerable, working through the trauma of his own upbringing at this late stage in his life. All who fell for Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World will delight in seeing her working with Trier again. She has a way of being enormously moving while remaining quite still. Her looks and gazes speak volumes.
Let’s admit that Sentimental Value – a film once again entranced by Oslo, its light and elegant interiors – depicts a prosperous, homogeneous world in which questions of art, morality and family inheritance matter more than any socio-economic issues. So much the better for that. Nor is it skewed by its apparent preoccupation with filmmaking. The subjects it really addresses – love and loss, understanding and forgiveness across generations – could not be more universal. You need only see a few minutes to think: so that’s how you do it.
“Sentimental Value” is in cinemas from 26 December
[Further reading: It Was Just an Accident is a reckoning with the Iranian regime]
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