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| Director Joachim Trier |
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| Trier with Eskil Vogt at Cannes |
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| Stellan Skarsgård |
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| Trier with his cast at Cannes |
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| Trier with Stellan Skarsgård |
SENTIMENTAL VALUE (Affeksjonsverdi) A Norway Germany Denmark France Sweden Great Britain Turkey (133 mi) 2025 d: Joaquim Trier
Winner of the Grand Prix (2nd place) at Cannes, though for my money this deserved to be the Cannes d’Or winner, receiving a 19-minute ovation at Cannes, one of the longest ever, only Guillermo del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006) at 22-minutes and Michael Moore’s FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (2004) at 20-minutes are longer, as Norwegian director and screenwriter Joachim Trier has gained international praise and numerous awards ever since his first feature films that include Reprise (2006), 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #10 Oslo, August 31 (2011), 2016 Top Ten List #3 Louder Than Bombs (2015), 2017 Top Ten List #4 Thelma, and 2021 #3 Film of the Year The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske), where actress Renate Reinsve won the Cannes Best Actress Award, all co-written by Eskil Vogt. His most ambitiously mature work yet, shot on 35mm, this examines the boundary between art and life in an unconventional Bergmanesque family drama, as if the children in Bergman’s FANNY AND ALEXANDER (1982) have grown up, only now it’s two sisters in a Daddy/daughter movie, and dead grandmother/daughter movie that features Nazi’s, suicide, love, abandonment, and the reconciliatory power of art, which are some major issues that could be heavy-handed in another director’s hands, but this strikes just the right balance, beautifully weaving it all together so that it makes sense at precisely the right dramatic moments, not always told in linear fashion. Most importantly, it’s Stellan Fuckin’ Skarsgård, probably the most decorated Scandinavian actor since Max von Sydow who has scarcely been seen in a worthwhile role since suffering a stroke three years ago, appearing earlier in Hans Petter Moland’s In Order of Disappearance (Kraftidioten) (2014) and A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN (2010), also David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Marius Holst’s 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #9 King of Devil's Island (Kongen av Bastøy) (2010), and of course Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s INSOMNIA (1997). Playing one of the best roles of his career, providing a tender portrait of a man facing his mortality, he brings a kind of confident yet morose Scandinavian gravitas to the picture, with just a touch of humor. Early on we see a gifted yet apprehensive Oslo actress Nora (Renate Reinsve) hyperventilating and in a state of panic about having to go onstage for the opening night of a new avant-garde production in Oslo’s National Theatre, where she’s literally freaking out in a scene fraught with tension, reminiscent of Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977). Literally nothing helps calm her down until she insists that one of the actors backstage, Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie, the actor most associated with this director), have quickie sex with her, but she settles for a hard slap in the face, a rather unconventional approach to calming the nerves, missing her initial musical cue, where the ominous orchestral music from the opening of Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980) stops, leaving utter silence in a darkened theater, but it begins again as she finally comes to her senses and boldly takes the stage, suddenly in full command of the audience. Heartfelt and deeply perceptive, with an opening third-person narration that is quite lovely and compelling, with clever flashbacks that illuminate the strange history of the 100-year old family home, this sets the scene for how the story unfolds, allowing viewers behind the scenes and under the surface in this closely observed family drama, divided into segments, like chapter headings, which are identified by fades to black. Trier, who is himself the grandson of the Norwegian director Erik Løchen, makes films that are so richly layered, terrifically acted, and thoughtfully written, employing a classic tradition of arthouse filmmaking that is at odds with the way films are made today, delving into the interpersonal, probing into the consciousness of viewers, with explosive ideas continually lingering in our imaginations.
Like Bergman, Trier also uses stage and film as a mirror of the reality of his characters. Nora, a name associated with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, lives with her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) in an immense family home in the outskirts of Oslo surrounded by overgrown gardens and trees that essentially becomes a central character of the film, filled with family secrets and memories, like Maurice Pialat’s historically expansive six-hour television film The House in the Woods (La Maison des Bois) (1971). Following the death of their mother through a long and painful illness, both are agitated and upset that their absent father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) arrives unexpectedly for the memorial service, and may be returning back home to sell the house, a place he hasn’t lived in for years, where they don’t want their lives uprooted and placed in turmoil, viewing their father as a destabilizing authority figure. It’s the earlier death of Gustav’s mother, however, that haunts the house, as she committed suicide in one of the rooms in what was just another ordinary day, nonchalantly sending her child off to school before taking her own life. Nothing has ever been the same since, where their distant father’s patriarchal presence hovering over their lives only fans the flames of emotional distress, where Nora in particular has never overcome the emotional wounds of the past, using her grief and anxiety to fuel her performances, but she’s reserved and isolated, with a private life that’s a disaster, unable to communicate to others with the ease of her sister. The much more diplomatic Agnes, on the other hand, has settled down with a family, raising an adorable nine-year old son Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven), leading a much more stable life. For his birthday, Gustav brings Erik hilariously inappropriate DVD’s of Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (Irréversible) (2002) and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (La pianiste) (2001), amusingly informing him “This is a film that will help you understand women.” The sisters are close-knit and remain best friends for life, with much of the drama revolving around the intimate moments of their lives. Nora turns to the man that slapped her, Jakob, for emotional support, a colleague and romantic interest, having a secret affair with him, but questions linger. Gustav is an outsider, having abandoned the family after divorcing their mother, becoming a renowned Norwegian filmmaker living in Sweden, as we see part of a revered early wartime film where a young girl flees from soldiers during World War II and saves herself on a departing train while her brother is left behind and caught, with the camera remaining on the face of the crying child for minutes, who turns out to be his daughter Agnes as a child, where the film is being shown at a film retrospective at the Deauville Film Festival in France. By introducing Gustav and the international power of cinema into the picture, Trier has taken a different approach to the loud political posturing and nationalistic divisions that currently separate us, preferring a medium that unites us, where the idea of listening and embracing the point of view of others seems like a radical concept, but it can also be personally transforming, creating an emotionally complex story that revolves around the healing power of tenderness, with no real false notes, where this film is about inheritance, pondering philosophical questions about what we ultimately pass down as our legacy, distinctly rooted in the wounds of personal history, using the power of cinema to elucidate the feelings we often fail to express. One of our most insightful and humane filmmakers, whose works are both organic and literary, Trier’s characters feel lived-in because they’re complex and flawed, which makes them more relatable, as there are no villains, heavy-handed scenes, or over-reaching melodrama, with a mostly understated, melancholic piano score by Hania Rani.
The once-famous and now almost-forgotten Gustav’s new project, his first in fifteen years, is to make an autobiographical film about his mother in the family house, which he has written with Nora in mind, but when he proposes the idea to her, she has no interest whatsoever, determined to be not like him, and turns him down without even reading the script, still stinging from his abandonment at such a crucial stage in their young lives. During a screening of his earlier work, Gustav is introduced to American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who is impressed by the multi-layered assurance of his film, with its multiple perspectives, and eventually agrees to work on his new project, which has an intoxicating effect, Sentimental Value Exclusive Movie Clip - Beach Horse (2025) YouTube (1:09). With that collaboration, the film has a movie star attached, a Netflix streaming distribution deal, and a script in English to accommodate its American lead. When the two of them arrive unannounced at the family home, both sisters are suddenly aghast at what they see out the window, with Nora quickly skipping out the back door, SENTIMENTAL VALUE | Official Clip | Coming Soon YouTube (1:42), while an exuberant Rachel recognizes Agnes from the film and actually wants to take a selfie with her. The film begins with the perspective of the two daughters, but expands into multiple perspectives of the parents, children, and families as it evolves, jumping between characters, and back and forth in time, becoming a sophisticated chamber drama probing the emotional exploration of art and the personal cost that often accompanies its creation. Gustav’s script, it turns out, is a stand-in for the emotional divide that the family is unwilling to discuss, an expression of how trauma has been passed down the family line, where the full complexity of its reach is only revealed during a walk-through reading with Rachel Kemp at the family home, where she takes her work seriously, and how personal this project is, painstakingly trying to find her place in the role, never more disturbingly uncomfortable than a concluding scene of a hanging suicide in one of the back rooms, an incident that happened when Gustav was only seven, yet shooting this in the house where it occurred only dredges up painful memories and adds to the burning intensity of the experience. In Kemp, Gustav undergoes a Vertigo (1956) obsession, continually altering Rachel’s look to appear more and more like his daughter. For viewers, Elle Fanning is miscast, yet that’s precisely the point, having her own misgivings with the role, as she recognizes Gustav is trying to make her into something she’s not, where even the English language she speaks doesn’t make sense when everyone else around her is speaking Norwegian. At its core, the film explores the fractured communication between Gustav and Nora, where she’s inherited his aversion to intimacy, choosing to have an affair with someone who’s married and unavailable, refusing to believe they are mirror images of one another, where their guarded distance reflects personal longing and unresolved grief. Nora’s anxiety is portrayed with elegance and sensitivity, with giant posters of Kemp’s perfume ads showing up all over the streets of Oslo, as if taunting her, while Gustav is never less than authentic, sublimating his own anxieties into artistic expression, yet Trier and his cinematographer Kasper Tuxen masterfully superimposes Gustav’s face with his two daughters in what can only be described as a tribute to an infamous Bergman shot from Persona (1966).
At every step of his new movie’s production, Gustav is forced to realize how cinema and his experience of making it have changed since his last movie over a decade ago, where his trusted cinematographer Peter (Lars Erik Väringer) can barely walk without an assisting device, making it impossible to hold a handheld camera, and his trusted producer Michael (Jesper Christensen) finds it more difficult to raise the needed financing, as Gustav is viewed as something of a has-been, no longer relevant in the industry, where his best days have passed him by. But he refuses to be deterred, even after Rachel drops out of the picture, as she realizes this project is more than she can comprehend in terms of attempting to heal deeply personal family wounds. One of the telling scenes is with Agnes, as Gustav has convinced her young son Erik to be in the picture, without informing his mother, which she finds insulting, as she takes great care in keeping her family together. But this incident forces her to read the script and do some digging, where she’s utterly shocked that it’s not at all what she expected, revealing an empathy her father had rarely shown them in real life, especially the revelations about Gustav’s mother, who was arrested and tortured by the Nazi’s after joining the Resistance and spent two years in prison. One of the more excruciating scenes is watching Agnes review her grandmother’s prison file during the Nazi occupation of Oslo, where some of the most devastating images are photographs and records of torture. There is a stunning correlation between Holocaust survivors and suicides, where studies have shown they are three times more likely to commit suicide. To an outsider, these are just statistics, but to a family member, this is a shocking revelation, offering insight into her troubled state of mind that might never have otherwise been known. The tragedy that has occurred in this house has lingering traumatic effects, delving into the psychological implications, where it effects each one of them differently, yet no one is left unscathed. Agnes was always the stabilizing force for her more insecure sister Nora, but that was not always the case. One of the most wrenching scenes in the entire movie is between them, with Nora wondering how Agnes survived their family relatively unscathed, to which she responds, “Because I had you,” a moment that changes everything we have seen so far, turning deeper, darker, and more truthful, plumbing emotional depths that no other film seen this year has achieved. This literally opens the floodgates, as the last half hour is simply superb filmmaking, challenging the collective amnesia of the nation, where heroic courage against the Nazi occupation and damning complicity are often blurred, with more than a few surprises, but each of them plunges us into entirely new emotional terrain, even what happens to the house, which is as horrifying as anything else seen, with rooms resonating with textured emotional history, where the home has a specific family legacy that matters only to them. Trier displays immense trust in his cast, who telegraph the magnitude of their characters’ feelings through their faces alone, captured in close-ups and long wordless shots, where it’s all about personal growth, while at the same time this is one of the better narrative films about the process of filmmaking, bringing together all the different elements involved, where it’s easy to see how it could collapse at any moment. A film of quiet devastations, uncomfortable laughter, and exposed vulnerability, we also discover the fragility of what lies beneath the surface, turning melancholic, hopeful, and unresolved, yet what lingers most is the film’s emotional honesty. A simply magnificent ending is told with poetic grace and skilled precision, revealing the nature of art as a healing force, which extends to the world at large, where few filmmakers can bring this deep emotional abyss to such a stunning resolution through the power of cinema as brilliantly as this, turning into a remarkable achievement of emotional depth and cinematic elegance.
