“Sentimental Value,” the latest film from the Danish-Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, is an awards season juggernaut. It racked up nine nominations for this year’s Academy Awards, including nods for its entire lead cast as well as Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, Best International Feature and Best Picture (it is the first Norwegian film to be nominated for that award). Previously it won the Grand Prix, the second most prestigious award at the Cannes Film Festival, and was showered with accolades from smaller awards bodies.
But for all of its accolades, the film itself is relatively modest: the tragicomic story of one family. It is intimate and understated, eschewing emotional fireworks for quiet conversations and meaningful silences. “Sentimental Value” finds its greatest power in what its characters can’t, or won’t, say.
Nora (Renate Reinsve) is a successful Oslo stage actress with a messy personal life. We meet her in the midst of an apocalyptic case of stage fright that involves asking to be slapped, attempting to run away and tearing her costume before finally going on and performing as if nothing happened. Her younger sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), is much more even-keeled, a historian with a husband and a young son. Both women have a strained relationship with their father, the once-prominent film director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård).
When their mother dies, Gustav returns to Oslo for the first time since he and his wife divorced. He isn’t just there to pay respects: He hopes to mount a comeback with a new film, inspired by the life and death of his own mother, and he wants Nora to play the lead. Offended that her father is only now taking an interest in her, Nora turns him down. In need of financing for his film, Gustav offers the role to Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), an American superstar looking to take her career in a new and more meaningful direction.
Gustav prepares to shoot his film in the old family home, where multiple generations of his family lived (and where his mother took her own life), becoming a presence in his daughters’ lives for the first time in years. The stage is set for a reckoning and, perhaps, reconciliation.
You could easily imagine it as a novel: a multigenerational story that hinges more on the interior growth of its characters than any external goal. The screenplay, written by Trier and his regular collaborator Eskil Vogt, is indeed a fantastic piece of writing: melancholy, insightful and (despite the often dark subject matter) very funny. But even more impressive is how Trier, a remarkably sensitive filmmaker, translates this essentially internal story to the screen. Gorgeously captured by the cinematographer Kasper Tuxen, each frame is arresting, even when it’s just the characters gazing off in silent reflection. Editor Olivier Bugge Coutté, who also received an Oscar nomination, cuts the film with an impeccable sense of rhythm, allowing both the comedic and meditative moments to land with equal weight.
The story really comes to life, though, through the work of its brilliant cast. Reinsve, who was both luminous and spectacularly flawed in Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” is a magnetic screen presence, effortlessly funny, heartbreaking and relatable. Skarsgård plays Gustav with equal charisma and selfishness: You can see why he would be irresistible as an artist and infuriating as a father. Fanning, already a formidable talent, reveals new depths in her nuanced, empathetic portrayal of Rachel. (For a real sense of Fanning’s range, pair this with her very different, but just as remarkable, performance in last year’s “Predator: Badlands.”) But the film’s true breakout is Lilleaas, who has the deceptively difficult task of portraying the family’s most well-adjusted member. She imbues Agnes with quiet strength and vulnerability, while also delivering some of the most devastating moments of the film.
The first time I saw “Sentimental Value” I was very moved, but I will admit that I thought it was, at times, a little detached. After a second viewing I realized the better word would be “indirect.” The characters rarely ever tell each other exactly what they are feeling. Instead, we see them express and release their emotions through substitutes: an object, a surrogate relationship, their work. For Nora, it’s acting; she is never more emotionally alive than when she is embodying a character onstage. And for Gustav, of course, it’s film. He hardly knows how to relate to other people except through movies. He’s clueless about how to support his daughters, but his work with Rachel is warm, encouraging, paternal. In person he is a frustrating mystery; any time another character comes to some understanding of him, it is through his films.
In “Sentimental Value,” as in life, some truths are too painful to put into plain language. Instead we must, as Emily Dickinson wrote, “tell it slant.” As Nora, Agnes and Gustav find, sometimes the only way to be honest is through layers of mediation and artifice. They approach what they really mean sideways, as if they are nervous about frightening it away. It’s a roundabout way of getting to the truth, but it’s worth the journey.
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