There is a scene early in Sentimental Value where Gustav Borg — a celebrated film director, estranged father, and Stellan Skarsgård in the performance of his career — visits his old cinematographer to propose they make one final film together. He arrives expecting the vigorous collaborator he remembers. What he finds is a frail old man with a cane. Gustav makes his excuses and backs away almost immediately.
Joachim Trier doesn’t underline the moment or hold the camera on it to let you absorb the significance. He trusts you completely, and what you understand without being told is that what Gustav is fleeing isn’t his old colleague. It’s his own face in thirty years.
That kind of restraint is the film’s defining quality, and its most remarkable achievement.
Sentimental Value follows sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) as they navigate the return of Gustav to their childhood home in Norway, following their mother’s death. Gustav has a new film to make — an autobiographical project centred on his own mother — and he wants Nora, an accomplished stage actress, to play the lead. When she refuses, he casts Rachel Kemp, a famous American actress played by Elle Fanning, and the film becomes a quiet, layered examination of what it costs a family when the most gifted person in it is also the most absent one.
Trier co-wrote the screenplay with his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt, and their script is a masterclass in what is left unsaid. Strained relationships aren’t only defined by their strain, and it’s often when the characters stop talking that old bonds reform just a little bit. There’s a scene where Gustav, who has bought his grandson some wildly inappropriate DVDs, shares a cigarette with Nora while they laugh about it — and that single moment tells you more about what their relationship could have been than any confrontation scene could.
Skarsgård is extraordinary. He plays Gustav with what one critic described as sadness worn like a cloak — the irony that he is a better father to Fanning’s Rachel than he ever was to Nora or Agnes is not lost on anyone, least of all Gustav himself. He still has the mischievous raconteur energy, the charm that made women and studios trust him for decades, but underneath it is a man who has begun to understand the accounting. Reinsve, who first announced herself to international audiences in Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, is even better here. Her Nora has a bewitching economy — she says more with a pause than most actors manage with a monologue.
Fanning’s character has a bracing and very American directness that cuts through all the wry Nordic reserve NPR, and she’s the unexpected joy of the film. The scenes between her and Skarsgård, as Rachel submits to Gustav’s artistic vision while quietly beginning to understand what she has walked into, are some of the most quietly funny and then unexpectedly moving in recent cinema.
Where I part ways with some of the more effusive critics — and this is a film that received 9 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture — is on the question of resolution. In building toward a redemptive ending, Sentimental Value lets everyone off the hook a little too easily, especially Gustav. NPR The NPR review called it “pat and predictable,” and I think that’s too harsh, but the criticism is pointing at something real: Trier, who has two young daughters himself, may love Gustav slightly more than the film needs him to.
The film is also, let’s be honest, not the leap forward from The Worst Person in the World that some critics have proclaimed. As a follow-up to Trier’s superior prior picture, it’s vaguely disappointing — not because it fails, but because nothing could recreate the feeling that The Worst Person in the World stirred when you first encountered it.
That said: Sentimental Value is still a film that will be living in your head a week after you’ve seen it. The cinematography by Kasper Tuxen is gorgeous, the score by Hania Rani is perfectly calibrated, and the family home at its centre — a space the film suggests we inhabit as much as we live in it, filled with the generations that passed through its rooms is one of the great locations in recent European cinema.
The title includes the word Sentimental. The film itself, to its enormous credit, resists sentimentality at nearly every turn. When it finally yields, it earns it.
Verdict: 8/10. A film of rare, adult intelligence about art, absence, and the complicated arithmetic of forgiveness. See it on MUBI.
