by Julian Wood
Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Anders Danielsen Lie, Jesper Christensen, Cory Michael Smith
Intro:
… an absolutely superb piece of filmmaking …
To some artists, it seems that life is there almost entirely to make art. The most obsessed artists can do this to an extreme extent. Their creativity and their egoism feed each other. One of the biggest casualties of this is in the actual lives of the people around that artist. These complex tropes are brilliantly explored in Joachim Trier’s excellent new film.
The filmmaker knows a thing or two about obsessive and slightly narcissistic people. In 2021, his film The Worst Person in the World, introduced Renate Reinsve to a wider audience. That film was a raw and slightly painful exploration of a young woman coming of age. Trier showed his protagonist with all her faults and self-doubts in such illuminating detail that you really did feel that you knew her inside and out. Reinsve was amazing in it. Trier and Reinsve bring that same intensity and focus to their latest film, family drama Sentimental Value.
This one has the advantage of having more characters and a wider lens. It also has the great Stellan Skarsgard in one of the most perfect pieces of casting in recent times. The film is built around him and no one else could play this part as well as he does here.
Skarsgard (a towering figure in Scandinavian film of course) plays Gustav, an overbearing father who always put his art first and his children second. When events conspire to reunite him with his semi-estranged adult children, he reaps the butter harvest of that neglect. The film is also an absorbing study of the relations between sisters. Gustav’s daughter Nora (Reinsve) has become an acclaimed stage actor. She invests in her roles so completely that she almost causes a nervous breakdown. Her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) has deliberately chosen to have nothing to do with the Arts and has become an academic historian. History is one thing, family history is quite another. Both sisters have their own way of remembering their sometimes traumatic childhood and they have several brilliantly scripted and acted scenes here where they explore, in the rawest possible terms, what this has meant to them.
Deliberately pretending to be oblivious to all this is Gustav. When there is talk of selling the family home, he turns up with yet another young screen hopeful in tow (Elle Fanning adding a finely judged complimentary performance). The sisters know what happens to young women who aspire to work with their dad… Further layers of manipulation are added by the fact that Gustav has a script that he has been writing for years that he wants Nora to act in. She knows it will be incredibly painful to do it. The script is full of outrageous plundering of personal experience but, as indicated above, this might also be where the deep artistic truth comes from.
The film is long and slow and, to some, it will no doubt seem very European-Arthouse. It is, however, an absolutely superb piece of filmmaking in both its writing and acting. The comparisons with the films of Ingmar Bergman are inevitable. To say that it stands up to that comparison is the highest compliment one could pay it.
