And you get an Academy Award, and you get an Academy Award, and...
(Affeksjonsverdi)
dir: Joachim Trier
2025
Sentimental Value has value far beyond the sentimental level. I’m not implying the title is somewhat ironic, but this is a flick that’s neither sentimental nor nostalgic, though it is about parents and their children, and time, and a house, and how almost none of our wounds are actually healed by time, regardless of what the adage says.
I’m not going to say that this is a naturalistic kind of flick, because it’s pretty much a story within a story within a story, using the artifice of film production to tell its story on a couple of levels. It’s not a particularly melodramatic flick. Some of these characters carry deep pain within themselves, but there are no easy solutions, cathartic breakdowns or elaborate, grand gestures that make everything okay for everyone forevermore.
Although one could argue that having the luxury to write and make a movie as an apology to one of your kids is a pretty grand, elaborate gesture, in the grand, elaborate scheme of things, but that’s a mere quibble.
This is set in Oslo, Norway, in a beautiful two storey wooden house, much of the time. The house is central to the story and to the characters, even though only one of them is living there when the film is transpiring in the present.
Stellan Skarsgård, patriarch of an immensely talented family of actors, plays Gustav Borg, an acclaimed director who might have been hot shit thirty years ago, but these days has to go cap in hand to Netflix to try to secure money for his projects. He abandoned his family, being his wife and two daughters, a long, long time ago.
The ex-wife has passed on as the movie starts proper, prompting his return to Norway, where his grown up daughters are less than pleased to see him. There is Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lillleas) whose eyes are wary, but who clearly is a peacemaker / diplomat / can’t we all just get along? kind of person. She has a husband and son, and a career as a historian, so she’s not as dependent on his approval.
And then there’s Nora (Renate Reinvse). We saw Nora before we saw Gustav, so we have some idea of what Nora is like based on her approaches to dealing with stage fright.
It’s something of a mini-character arc watching her do everything in her power to not go on stage to commence her performance. She tries everything from running away, trying to have sex, demand to be slapped in the face, try to claw her way out of her costume, all before, much to the relief of the crew and the theatre staff, she eventually goes out there and presumably wows everyone.
We don’t see much of Nora’s performances when she forces herself onto the stage; we spend time with her when she’s not. We spend time with her when she’s drowning in pools of sadness, and trying to do anything to avoid spending any time with a father she deeply, deeply resents.
We sense she may be a great actor, but all she wants is the respect and admiration of a father who abandoned her decades ago, and refuses to watch her plays because he, like most people, hates watching plays.
When he tells her that he’s making a movie and he wants her to play the lead, she rejects it out of hand, so naturally if you can’t get your daughter to play the lead in your film, you get Elle Fanning to star instead.
I mean, she’s not playing herself, but she might as well have. They give her a cover name like Rachel Kemp, but we know she’s playing Elle Fanning. I guess she’s a pretty big deal down at the Hollywood cracker factory, but in the context of this flick she’s a Hollywood megastar and is on billboards and screens shilling for Chanel or some similar luxe company, so everyone, even in Norway, knows who she is.
Is it a passive-aggressive way of getting back at his daughter, even though he claims he wrote it for her? Well, this flick is at least partly about the film making environment that filmmakers finds themselves in at present, so it makes some kind of sense that, in order to secure funding, attaching a star like Elle to a project would get you a green light, even if it’s going to be for Netflix (the joke for me being this flick has nothing to do with Netflix, instead securing some funding from streaming rival Mubi).
Rachel genuinely wants to work with Gustav on this project, but regardless of how supportive and solicitous he is (which he can’t seem to extend towards his own daughters), he keeps blinding himself to the fact that she’s not right for the role, and she knows it. Yet he asks her to dye her hair so that it looks a bit more like Nora’s, and she wonders whether she should be doing a Norwegian accent…
There is a great scene where Rachel wants to meet Nora, and we realise she’s mirroring her, either consciously or not, as if she’s been shaped by Gustav, or whether what she’s picked up in the script has made her lean in that direction. It’s not like she knows who Nora is. She might be stage famous or tv famous in Oslo, but she’s not an international star like Elle / Rachel.
Nora… why would anyone want to be like Nora… she seems utterly miserable. There are reasons, but we are not privy to them, so we assume it’s because the father abandoned them and went off to be an acclaimed director and bang famous actresses, leaving them with an embittered mother and no-one else to protect them from the vagaries of life. She is miserable in specific and general ways, and we assume that her reluctance to commit to people in relationships is as a result of her abandonment issues.
We think we’re so great psychoanalysing characters when we’re not told what’s explicitly wrong with them, but we also don’t necessarily grasp that this might just be who Nora is. Gustav sees in her much of himself, and claims to be super sensitive, just like her, but we wouldn’t know that from how he acts.
Speaking of acting, praising Skarsgård’s acting seems redundant, but he does so well here, even though he’s playing much to type. And by “type” I mean he’s playing an older man who still flirts with every waitress and nurse who crosses his path, who is acutely aware of his own mortality, and is disgusted by the frailty he sees in others his own age. He’s determined to use a cinematographer he’s worked with many times before, but is shocked when he sees him struggling to get out of a chair or walking shakily with a cane, and sneakily retracts the offer, telling him Netflix might want him to work with someone else.
Seeing his face grow soft and tender in the presence of his grandson, and hard and flinty when he’s trying to cajole Nora and Agnes into doing what he wants wouldn’t seem to be much of a stretch for an actor of his calibre, when you remember what he’s done in dozens of other roles. But there’s a believable gentleness to him, a genuine seeming depth of regret for all he’s fucked up that he knows he can’t make up for. The sheer bullheadedness with which he thinks he can make up for the past through making this movie, and that it would somehow ‘fix’ everything for Nora as well, eventually doesn’t come across as just stubbornness, or bloody-mindedness; it’s his fervent hope, a secular prayer.
It would be unconscionable to ‘enjoy’ watching someone suffer, so I have to admit to a certain amount of ambivalence to talking about Renata Reinsve’s performance, but there’s no doubting that it’s any bit as great as Skarsgård’s or the actress playing her sister. Three incredible performances for three completely different reasons. It’s just that there are times where it hurts to watch someone in so much pain, though I guess that’s the intent.
I don’t want to make it sound melodramatic, because on the most part it’s not. This is not a flick filled with screaming matches, or the most acting, or people tearing strips off of each other in order to reach some emotional truths (and awards ceremonies). But there are some heartfelt conversations, and there is specifically a conversation between the sisters towards the end of the film, when Agnes has read the script, and finally understands why Nora has to play the role, that is such a beautiful scene, such a heart-touching scene, that is probably one of the best scenes in any film from 2025, or many years previous.
The ending, also, couldn’t be more perfect, so perfectly realised and beautifully put together.
There are a bunch of cinematic references in the flick, really obvious ones to Ingmar Bergman, including a lurid, surreal scene where the faces of some of the central actors are superimposed upon each other as if to say “This is a specific reference to Persona don’t you know?” that is screamingly pretentious, but I’m not going to criticise it, because that would seem churlish. There is nothing wrong with this director affirming his deep admiration for a director of such legendary status, especially since one of his main characters is a director himself, and we’re meant to think he’s someone who’s that talented, that he could make a film almost magical in its intent, that it could heal three people, let alone succeed at the box office and with the critics.
His central pain is not realising late in life that he’s a selfish piece of shit or a shameless drunk, but that the trauma of having lost his mother at a young age from suicide still haunts him, because he still can’t understand how she could leave him. Separately, we see Agnes travel to an archive and find out information about her grandmother’s incarceration and torture at the hands of a government collaborating with the Nazis, which left her deeply traumatised even though she survived, and that pain has travelled down through the generations through her son to her granddaughter as well. That’s just my simplistic take; the flick never sets it out so explicitly.
It all comes back to the house, doesn’t it? A place that saw some joy, but much sadness, and its final fate is to be stripped bare, updated, and then sold, as a place that maybe retained the hopes, dreams and despair of many souls, but which they need to be free of, and it needs to be free of them too.
It’s such a great film. It’s slyly funny (I cannot believe the second hand DVDs Gustav brings to his grandson as a birthday gift; calling them inappropriate barely scratches the surface), it’s warmly humane, it’s beautifully constructed, it has a sublime score by Polish composer Hania Rani, and I could not have enjoyed it more if I’d been in it. In fact if I’d been in it, the film would have had a flaw, but as it stands, it doesn’t, at least in my eyes.
A remarkable film.
10 times I could have played a taxi driver maybe out of 10
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“And then, for the first time, I sat down on the floor... and prayed. I don't know who I said it to, but, I said it out loud, "Help me, I can't do this anymore. I can't do it alone. I want a home. I want a home." - Sentimental Value
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