The Sublime Sentimental Value Is the Toast of This Year’s Cannes Film Festival

Nora Berg, the Oslo thirtysomething played by Renate Reinsve in the sublime Sentimental Value, sums up her dysfunctional relationship with her father by saying that they just can’t communicate. It’s true, though over the course of the movie, the latest from Joachim Trier, we come to understand it’s really only part of the problem. Nora, an actor, and Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a filmmaker, are too alike, and rather than bringing them close, they are like two people who realize that they’ve shown up to a party in the same outfit. They have intimacy issues, and are better at sublimating their emotions into their work than they are at grappling with them on a personal level. They’re both prone to melancholy, and are solitary for reasons they like to think are related to a commitment to their art and a need for freedom.

Gustav left his family when Nora and her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) were still children. When he blusters back into their lives after the death of their mother, insisting that he wants Nora to star in what will be his first film in 15 years, in a role he wrote specifically for her, it’s unclear who would be doing the favor to who. Maybe he’s making a sincere attempt at reconciliation by providing her with rich material, or maybe he’s just making a bid to give his project a catchy personal narrative, especially considering that Nora’s star has been rising regionally. Nora assumes the worst, and the resentment she’s been harboring bubbles to the surface as she turns him down. Gustav turns around and does something that wasn’t primarily intended as revenge, but serves those purposes astonishingly well: he meets a famous American star named Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) at a film festival where his work is being given a retrospective, and recruits her to be his leading lady instead. 

Sentimental Value — which just premiered at Cannes to possibly unprecedented acclaim, and which, like all of Trier’s fiction films, was co-written by Eskil Vogt — is about art and history and emotional openness, but it’s more than anything a playful but also wondrously frank exploration of what it actually means to be family. There’s a fleetness to the way Trier’s films move through time that’s become his most distinctive quality as a director — a trick borrowed from the French New Wave and made his own. He likes to dart forward or sideways in quickstep montages, narrated by a voiceover that’s sometimes wry and sometimes just knowing, offering bursts of information that open like windows off his main narrative. The Worst Person in the World, which also starred Reinsve, introduced her character with a quick-cut sequence about her discovering that her true calling isn’t medicine but psychology — only for her to then have an identical, if less convincing, revelation that what she actually was put on the earth to do is photography. Trier’s 2006 film Reprise is effervescent with bursts of memories and digressions as it tracks its two friends, both young aspiring writers, in their attempts to conquer the literary world.

In Sentimental Value, those montages provide glimpses into the past, inevitably in the house where Nora and Agnes grew up, which has been in the family for generations, and which is where Gustav wants to shoot his film. Nora’s great-great-grandfather dies in a bedroom where her grandmother was born and then where her parents have screaming matches leading up to their separation. The house, brown with red trim and a crack running up the wall from a foundational flaw when it was built, is the gravitational center around which the characters orbit, but it’s also a portal into the past — a place where history is literally written on the walls in the height markers of generations of kids on a doorway, and where characters are shown echoing each others’ behavior, like using an old stove to eavesdrop on conversations in another room. Gustav tries to use it to commune with the past and with the present in his own way by ending his film with a scene that recreates his mother’s suicide when he was a child, but also serves as a way of acknowledging Nora’s unhappiness, art and memory on top of one another in the same space.

It’s goosebump-inducing, and it’s enabled by the performances — with Lilleaas as the more stable of the sisters, a vulnerable Fanning as an actor increasingly worried she’s wrong for the part, and Reinsve and Skarsgård in particular. Reinsve, with that phenomenally open, oval face, does an unreal job of transmitting emotions that Nora is barely aware that she’s feeling. Skarsgård is at turns infuriating, charming, and pitiable as an aging artist filled with regret, but also too stubborn to yield. When their characters do attempt to talk, especially in a scene where they sit down to dinner and start getting on each other’s most raw nerves almost immediately, it’s like watching an impeccably choreographed dance. You see them in each other, those habits, those sensitivities, those impulses toward defensiveness and self-pity and a desire to help. We can’t control which pieces of ourselves we pass along to our children or take from our parents, but they inform the people we become, whether we can see those connections ourselves or not. In Sentimental Value, the past forms a filigree-delicate web with the present, never left behind, even if the people caught up in it can’t always feel it.