Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve and Elle Fanning Form a Powerful Triangle of Yearning and Creativity in Joachim Trier’s Masterful ‘Sentimental Value’ 

Alci Rengifo

Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” is a delicate drama that masterfully balances various angles all at once. It is a meditation on how we cannot choose our parents, at times left to pick up the pieces of what they leave behind. This is also an excellent film about filmmaking, and the ways real art can flower out of personal, even painful, experiences. For everyone involved it is a triumph, while, for Trier in particular, it signals his continuing growth as a major contemporary director. Here the Norwegian filmmaker demonstrates again that he can shift course and not repeat himself, though sustain a clear voice. As co-star Elle Fanning told Entertainment Voice, “He understands the human condition on another level.” 

Trier reunites with Renate Reinsve, the star of his previous film, “The Worst Person in the World,” a virtual Rosetta Stone for the millennial experience. Here she plays Nora, an actress we first meet having a panic attack before a performance of “A Doll’s House.” She begs fellow actor Jacob (Anders Danielsen Lie), a married man she is having an affair with, for either sex or a slap to stimulate her into focusing on the performance. Nora is the black sheep of her artistic family which includes her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who settled into married life and has a young son. Their lives are clearly haunted by the distant presence of their father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), an aged film director. Years ago he essentially ran out on their mother. She has recently passed away in the house where the family once lived together, which happens to also be Gustav’s childhood home. To their dismay, he still has the legal rights to the property. When the enigmatic man himself appears, he nearly stuns Nora with the revelation that he has written a script and would like her to star in it. When she refuses, he opts to try with an American actor, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). 

“You can love someone and be so different from them. It’s about growing up in the same home but it’s not the same home at all,” is how Reinsve describes one of the key themes in the film. Some have already rightly compared “Sentimental Value” to the work of Ingmar Bergman. Certainly there is that same obsession here with the silent pains inside some families. Gustav was not an abusive man to his daughters and when he returns into their lives there is so much genuine affection there. But he is also an individual marked by his own roots. His new script is based on the life of his own mother, who committed suicide in this same house that unites them all. She herself could never get over the trauma of having endured torture by the Nazis during World War II. In his most private moments, Gustav will drink to silence the inner demons and no doubt his own lingering guilt as a father. Every character has something we can empathize with or criticize. Nora sternly refuses to even see Gustav after his attempt to cast her. Agnes is still scarred from having been a child actor in one of her father’s most acclaimed films, only to see him vanish from their lives after shooting finished. Yet, she at least makes the effort to visit local public records to learn about her great grandmother’s war experiences, in order to piece together why Gustav is as he is.

This is the first engaging level of “Sentimental Value,” the other is its exploration of filmmaking. Trier remarkably fits in what could have been a whole other movie, but in just the right doses. One senses the director approaching much of this material from personal experiences, like the moments where Gustav is showing Rachel around the house that will double as his set, attempting to place her in the correct mindset (including comically misleading her about the history behind a particular stool). Fanning is wonderful in this role, never feeling like she’s just playing herself, but creating a whole other actor challenged by a role she soon feels imposter syndrome towards. Skarsgård has been around so many modern greats one can clearly see him applying what he has observed into making Gustav a confident, though selfish artist who knows exactly what he wants. “I see the typical director as this little child who sits very lonely and builds his own world and plays with it. In so many cases it’s true,” Skarsgård told Entertainment Voice when discussing interpreting a personality type he has dealt with his entire career.

Trier then ever so elegantly ties all of the story’s undercurrents with emotional force without resorting to bombastic twists and turns. With “The Worst Person in the World,” he made one of the best films about the millennial experience precisely by avoiding some of the clichés that would have turned the movie into another rom com if it were made in the United States. In “Sentimental Value,” he forces the characters to confront their own wounds and resentments with necessary conversations, tense silences and honest outpourings. Even when he cuts to Nora in bed with her lover, the mood is not scandalous but a reflection on how lonely Nora is deep down. This other actor will never ponder a more serious relationship with her, but even he makes cutting observations about how closed off she is from real intimacy. Reinsve and Trier are becoming an artistic duo akin to Bergman and Liv Ullmann, perfectly in tune to each other’s artistic sensibilities. She has all of the vulnerability and steadfastness this director loves to play with in crafting characters which seem to embody our modern sense of collective isolation. 

“It’s a love letter to cinema and creation, and how sometimes you can’t directly express what you need to toward the people that you love,” says co-writer Eskil Vogt. He phrases it just right. “Sentimental Value” is an enveloping drama. So much genuine art is born out of our most painful experiences, and those secrets we wouldn’t openly share unless they were disguised in fiction. Nora seems only capable of pouring out all her inner frustrations when she is on stage. Rachel Kemp sees her and realizes she may never be able to actually fill a fictional version of this woman’s shoes. Making real cinema is hard work, and for these characters even more so. Gustav is not doing it just for the money, even when Netflix offers to produce his movie. This film may be the last real hope to reconnect with the daughters he left behind. “Sentimental Value” is one of this year’s best films because of all of its wonderful elements, and because, like few dramas this year, it leaves us thinking about life itself.

“Sentimental Value” releases Nov. 7 in select theaters.