Sentimental Value

Bluesky

A house becomes more than a simple family haven in the latest film from Joachim Trier, it is also a map to the generational history and trauma that have unfolded within it. While a crack, indicating subsidence, down one wall may seem an obvious metaphor, it is nonetheless appropriate for the drama that ensues. Trier and his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt are interested in roles, in general, not just that taken on by the places we live but those we ‘perform’, both consciously and not, within families and, for that matter, within the world of filmmaking and the response to it.

Their latest film is highly textured, from the physical spaces their characters occupy to the emotional walls that have been constructed by them. It is also a drama that could easily lead a critic down the line of plot regurgitation, such are the intricacies at work – a sneaky role I’m going to try to resist filling, although some orientation is inevitably required.

The physical house where much of the action unfolds is a good place to start. It’s where Nora (Reinate Reinsve) and her younger sibling Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) grew up and where the marriage of their filmmaker father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgaard) and psychiatrist mother disintegrated. It is also the site of family tragedy in the generation before and a place where secrets can travel through the pipework, if you know where to listen. Following the death of their mother, it turns out Gustav still owns the home, which is just one of the pressure points that comes to bear, especially for Nora, whose unresolved issues with her father run deep and whose career as an actress is marred by panic attacks of operatic and tragicomic proportions.

Gustav is an old charmer, a skill we see at work as he laps up the attention at Deauville Film Festival – one of the “real” elements of filmmaking Trier and Vogt draw on to help Sentimental Value feel lived in and which often give it a swift kick of cinephile-geared humour, including a joyously inappropriate birthday gift for his grandson Erik (Oyvind Hesjedal Loven). Gustav may quickly win over the appreciation of young American starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), whom he meets in Deauville, but finds his attempts to fix his fractured relationship with Nora much less simple.

After more than a decade’s lay-off he has written a script which he wants Nora to take the lead role in, but the idea of dancing to her father’s tune is something she fiercely resists, leading him instead to cast Rachel. Trier and Vogt let life and art rub up against one another in provocative ways, sometimes blurring the line between the real and the performed to such a degree we’re unsure what exactly we are watching.

That ambiguity around emotional truth throbs beneath Trier and Vogt’s own screenplay, which proves almost devastatingly observant about family roles and, particularly, how adult children can find themselves struggling to stop trying to navigate water that has already flown under the bridge – something that is as true for Gustav as it is for his daughters. Its celebration of sibling bonds is also satisfying in its embrace of the complexity that piles up with a lifetime’s knowledge of what makes one another tick.

What marks Trier out is his ability to take on intellectual ideas like this but make them play out in ways that don’t feel forced or overly constructed, something that could only be fully achieved with this sort of high calibre cast. Reinsve, Fanning and Skarsgard might be its most internationally recognised members, along with Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie – this time in a small yet crucial role as Nora’s married lover – but Lilleaas also puts in a beautifully nuanced performance as the less showy of the sisters. Beguiling bookending tracks by Terry Callier and Labi Siffre that seem to float in on a breeze of warm understanding embrace the film like a hug you didn’t know you needed but which makes everything feel as though it will be okay.

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