Sentimental Value Review: Joachim Trier’s Startlingly Intimate Family Drama

Premiering at Cannes, Joachim Trier’s follow-up to The Worst Person in the World is a tender portrait of deep generational pain, starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning

Joachim Trier’s Oslo Trilogy – Reprise, Oslo, August 31st, and The Worst Person in the World – wryly and sensitively chart the evolving pressures of modernity for young Norwegians across the first couple of decades of the 21st century. Ambition and expression, ego and self-knowledge are in conflict with each other, and with an immediate, disarming style and startlingly intimate performances (including beautiful Scandi actors shedding perfect tears in gorgeous naturalistic light), the trilogy observes how spiritual crises have been replicated for a generation of modern youngsters. His latest and most ambitious drama, Sentimental Value, is clearly connected to his trilogy of best received work, primarily because it’s about the deeper generational pain that can’t be unearthed and cleansed by personal discovery.

Nora (Renate Reinsve) is an actress on the rise, but suffers a catastrophic anxiety attack seconds before stepping on stage at Oslo’s National Theatre. Her father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), is a celebrated Swedish film director who has remained distant from Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) since their parents divorced years prior. When their mother passes away, Gustav returns to Nora’s life and the looming, historic family home that Nora has a lifetime of shifting, unprocessed feelings about. Trier once again deploys a disembodied narrator to take us through his character’s inner worlds, and an opening montage deftly introduces us to Nora’s inner contradictions: as a child, she wrote an essay from the perspective of the house, but when she rediscovered the piece when prepping for an audition, she dismissed her unsophisticated but honest insight into a fraught upbringing when she rediscovers the essay while prepping for an audition years later. 

Gustav is an arrogant, vain artist who can only manifest close relationships through his work – it’s no surprise the reason he wants to reenter his hesitant daughter’s life is to cast her in a new project set in their family home about a young mother who commits suicide (this is also how Gustav’s mother passed). Nora is appalled and rejects the offer, leading to Gustav inviting the buzzy American starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), whose intrusion on Nora’s family home triggers more panic. Sentimental Value is pitched as an exploration of “the reconciliatory power of art”, but for most of the film, it’s an incisive look at art’s inability to create truly purifying expression. 

When Nora flees the house seconds before Rachel first intrudes on it, Trier cuts to her rehearsing a play, where her character enters her bedroom and has a violent crying spell on the floor. Just like Gustav’s desire to get close to the source of his family’s pain through film, the extremes of art’s emotions are only therapeutic to a point, channelling our pain to a point that may be compelling and affecting, but not necessarily restorative. Trier indulges in a string of film industry jokes – the ones about Netflix theatrical windows and Lasse Hallström are welcome, but Gustav gifting his nine-year-old grandson inappropriate DVDs of Irréversible and The Piano Teacher feels too acutely designed for a cineliterate crowd.

Fanning is capable as the sensitive A-lister who jumps at the chance to work with a real artist, but much like Rachel’s gradual realisation of the personal significance of Gustav’s film, Fanning understands she’s an outsider to the script’s (co-written by Trier and Eskil Vogt) most compelling drama. The film’s three stunted grown-ups each roam on their own paths of self-doubt, forcing each other, tearfully, to acknowledge the wounds they have let fester (following Gustav’s example, of course). It’s exhilarating to watch Skarsgård in a commanding role that calls on such fragility and unpleasantness (not to mention speaking a non-English language), and the quiet insights into the patriarch’s despair are well complemented by Reinsve, whose evocation of loneliness is etched into her body, waiting to flair up in the face of rejection or mistreatment. 

The discovery of the film is Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who infuses the more grounded Agnes (in contrast with Nora, she’s married with a kid and an academic job) with a curiosity that draws Agnes towards understanding why her father communicates the way he does, and why her family have put up with it with a far greater clarity than her sister. After Trier failed to give Julie meaningful female friendships or family in The Worst Person in the World, it’s a relief to see rich and fraught sisterhood take centre stage here. 

There are emotional strands that feel laboured – it doesn’t help that the snippets we hear of Gustav’s script sound obvious and tired – but Sentimental Value is so frequently and convincingly moving in how it zeroes in on the gaps in affection and acceptance that neglect creates within a family. If art wants to be redemptive, it needs to make honest and sincere connections between its players. It’s a familiar maxim that Trier makes lively again: art is not just excavation, but rather renewal.