by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $12.50
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:
... essentially a set of clichés, dressed in Nordic freshness ...
The winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and eight-time Golden Globe nominee, Sentimental Value by Norwegian director Joachim Trier is also expected to be one of the frontrunners in the Oscar race for Best International Feature. It seems that everyone loves this film — especially critics and people within the film industry. However, that is precisely its main problem – to be loved by everyone.
The story follows several generations of the Borg family, who grew up in an old house with carved shutters. Nora and Agnes are sisters organising their mother’s funeral. The elder sister Nora (Renate Reinsve) is a childless theatre actress plagued by panic attacks before going on stage. The younger one, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), is married and has a ten-year-old son, Erik. As a child, she starred in a prominent film directed by her father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård). Shortly after shooting, following years of quarrels and scandals, father left the family. Nora has never forgiven him for this, while Agnes treats her famous father more gently.
When Gustav shows up at the funeral of his ex-wife, his daughters are far from thrilled to see him. However, he has a goal: at the gathering after the funeral, he offers Nora the lead role in his new film (he hasn’t made a feature in 15 years). He wants to shoot in their ancestral home, which legally still belongs to him, and which he considers a place of historical memory — not only where his daughters were born, but also where his mother, a WWII concentration camp survivor, took her own life. Nora cannot forgive him and refuses. At the Venice Film Festival, Gustav finds a replacement — American starlet Rachel (Elle Fanning), who dreams of working with a “great European arthouse director.”
This is the setup of a Scandinavian-spirited tragicomedy with many echoes of Ingmar Bergman. In terms of tone, the first half leans more comedic, while the second shifts toward serious drama. A distant relative of Lars von Trier, Joachim Trier previously made The Worst Person in the World with Renate Reinsve. That film became a cinephile favourite with its light storytelling and Trier’s trademark “gliding” style. However, in the new film, Reinsve doesn’t fully handle the emotional intensity of the role: she overacts in comic scenes and remains detached in tragic ones. If this is meant to be a story about a daughter’s trauma from her parents’ divorce, Nora doesn’t inspire much sympathy. Skarsgård’s performance is brilliant, though he slightly feels confined in yet another familiar celebrity role.
Overall, the screenplay is essentially a set of clichés, dressed in Nordic freshness: the house as a member of the family; the ancestral home as a source of generational trauma; “daddy issues” as a path to potential suicide; a dinner at Venice’s Excelsior Hotel as a metaphor for the entire film industry; a Hollywood star searching for a European auteur; and on top of all that, roots of trauma stretching back to WWII. This virtuoso mix of rather familiar themes is presented as “pure life.”
Perhaps this is life for a 70-year-old Norwegian man from the art world (plus Bergman’s shadow), but the chain of micro-stories and their delivery feels manipulative. One of the most opportunistic moments is the scene where Gustav gives his grandson a DVD box set including Haneke’s The Piano Teacher — a joke meant to make savvy cinephiles (and critics, especially) laugh loudly, which indeed happened at Cannes. Had screenwriters Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier not skimmed across so many themes in an attempt to embrace everything, and instead focused more deeply on genetic and generational trauma (to which the finale ultimately points), the film might have turned out far more profound and honest.
