Film Review - Sentimental Value
Images courtesy of Madman Entertainment.
Sentimental Value begins with a young woman named Agnes describing an assignment she was given as a child where she was to write something from the perspective of an object. She chooses her childhood home which has been in her family for generations and describes how it would feel if it were sentient. It ends with an artificial rendering of the same house that has been painstakingly recreated in a warehouse as part of a film. A house is never just a house, but a vessel of memories. The impressive thing about Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value is that not only is it a sentimental film, but one that uses form to explore said sentimentality.
It became apparent to me after The Worst Person in the World that Joachim Trier's films occupy millennial anxieties incredibly well. He really has the finger on the pulse when it comes to the things that terrify us: never knowing where you stand with your emotionally distant father, feeling like you'll end up miserable and alone, even feeling like you're somehow lesser than others because of your emotional baggage. And yet, the film more or less singularly occupies the perspective of Stellan Skarsgård's Gustav, a semi-retired filmmaker who has one more film left in him. He's desperate to use it as a means to reconcile with his estranged daughters following their mother's death.
The thing about Gustav is that he communicates his love in the most typical older male way: he doesn't. He holds people at arm's length, and gets defensive if you call him out on it. He could be your father. He could be my father. Despite the apparent coldness, there is a warmth there. That's what makes this film so heartbreaking. Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) and Nora (Renate Reinsve) have been strung along by the promise of fatherly love for years. Agnes starred in a film of his as a child and was the most important person to him during production, but it became apparent to her that he cared more about the film than his relationship with her, or so she thought. Nora has never been in such a privileged position, and considers herself 'eighty percent fucked up' as a result. He tries to reconnect by getting her to read his screenplay in the film's beginning. She refuses, not understanding that film is the only way he can express emotion. I'm not sure what was scarier: the fact that I saw my own father in Gustav or that I saw myself in 40 years staring back at me in the mirror. Then I thought: am I becoming my father? There's an authenticity to his character I couldn't deny.
Initially, I was sceptical of the use of filmmaking as window dressing for the film's story, but Sentimental Value isn't meta in an obnoxious way. It uses form to communicate events within the narrative in the most subtle of ways. The meta qualities inform character, rather than just being there to be clever. For example, Elle Fanning's Rachel Kemp goes full Vertigo, attempting to adopt a Scandinavian accent, dying her hair, and cutting it short to resemble Nora, who Gustav originally offered the role to. This isn't gimmicky or forced, however, but enriches Kemp’s arc and the story as a whole. This might be Fanning's best performance too, showcasing the vulnerability of her character perfectly. The form dictates the events of the narrative, many of which are subtextual or implicit, until we're left with sublime character moments that make the events feel more impactful than any explicit story beat ever could. This film is a tearjerker of the highest order.
Ultimately, Sentimental Value tells a familiar story, but the humanity of its characters and use of form in telling its story means it transcends the tropes and cliches of both films about filmmaking and family melodramas. Ironically, for a film about the artifice of cinema, it doesn't feel artificial at all.
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Sentimental Value is screening in cinemas from Boxing Day. For tickets and more info, click here.