Ask most film scholars to name a great Swedish director, and they’ll say Ingmar Bergman. Ask them for a great Finnish director, and they’ll say Aki Kaurismäki. Ask them for a great Danish director, and they’ll say Carl Dreyer (or Lars von Trier, if they don’t hate his films to pieces).
Norway has a filmmaker who’s worthy of joining that august company, and it’s Joachim Trier. That was true before he made the affecting Sentimental Value, which looks poised to make Trier famous to more than just the hard-core cinephiles, not least because it’s partially in English. It’s only opening at the Alamo Drafthouse Denton this weekend, but it’s likely to see more screens as it picks up awards during this season. It’s still worth the trip to the county to our north to see.
The film begins with world-famous half-Swedish filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) returning to Oslo for his ex-wife’s funeral and trying to re-connect with his estranged daughters. He’s preparing to direct his first movie in 15 years, and he offers the lead role to his older daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), a theater and TV actress who’s only known in her home country. Barely able to stand being in the same room with him, she turns the part down without reading the script, but the production bounces back into her life anyway. That’s because Gustav hands the part to A-list Hollywood star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) and plans to shoot the film in his family’s ancestral home.
Reinsve has a track record of playing messy women in Trier’s The Worst Person in the World as well as Armand from earlier this year, and arguably none of her previous characters is as messed up as Nora. She’s having an affair with a married fellow actor (Anders Danielsen Lie). She suffers from terrible stage fright, which delays the start of a production of Medea at the Oslo Opera House until she has her boyfriend slap her in the face. Despite her volcanic presence onstage, she is plagued by an inchoate depression, and her father doesn’t know that she once tried to kill herself. When Gustav tells his daughters that they are the best thing in his life, she laughs and asks, “Then why were you never here?” Nora’s resentment and dissatisfaction, which run deeper than her daddy issues to family history that she’s not aware of, feel perfectly lived-in and familiar as old slippers in Reinsve’s performance, so that she generates a great sense of presence of this troubled creative person.
She’s matched by the rest of the cast, including Fanning as a dedicated actress who gradually realizes that she doesn’t fit the part, especially when Gustav has Rachel dye and style her hair to look like Nora. As Nora’s younger sister who left show business for an academic career, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleeas bears up beautifully as the person who’s holding the family together.
As for Skarsgård, he flashes the form that first brought him to the world’s attention in the 1990s. While he’s famously a father of actors in real life, he seems to have re-invented his whole life experience for this character who appears only to relate to his children when he’s directing them on a set. Gustav is an obsessive with a handy and wrongheaded excuse for neglecting his daughters: “Artists need freedom! You’re not going to make great art while driving kids to soccer practice and comparing car insurance.” He refuses to watch Nora act because he hates live theater and makes it clear that he hated the TV show that she starred in. For all that, it turns out to be quite moving when the daughters finally read their father’s script and realize that the self-centered old bastard has understood them way better than he has let on.
Trier brings back the omniscient narrator that he used in The Worst Person in the World, and he probably should have dropped it. The stylistic flourishes of that movie and Trier’s others are out of place here. Sentimental Value relies more on the old-fashioned virtues of character insight and good writing and acting. (It is really funny when Rachel’s presence gets Netflix to finance Gustav’s film, and the streamer starts meddling in the production.) Maybe it’s wishful thinking to believe that art might heal the wounds in this family, but as the movie ends with Gustav finally watching Nora act, the idea is worth believing in.
Sentimental Value
Starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, and Elle Fanning. Directed by Joachim Trier. Written by Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier. Rated R.
