Norwegian writer and director Joachim Trier’s latest film, Sentimental Value, cannot be bound by traditional methods of storytelling. And, much like one of the other best films of the year, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, it can’t even be bound to one protagonist. Instead, it drifts from lead to lead, each as interesting as the last. It’s these “quirks” that make Sentimental Value not only one of the best films of the year, but one of the best movies ever made about how artists relate to their loved ones. Which, of course, makes it especially devastating.
Sentimental Value’s first scene follows the opening night of a play starring theater actress Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve, who was also the star of Trier’s last film, The Worst Person in the World). Just before she goes on, she has a nervous breakdown, demanding that one of the crew people, Jacob (Anders Danielsen Lie, who was Reinsve’s co-lead in The Worst Person in the World), either make love to her or slap her moments before she’s about to go on. We get the sense this isn’t the first time that she’s suffered from this sort of stage fright. Also affecting Nora is the recent death of her mother, which prompts her to return to the house that she and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), grew up in. It’s here that Nora finds out that her father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård, in a performance that should most certainly earn him an Oscar), still technically owns the house, despite divorcing their mother and leaving when they were young. Gustav is a well-respected filmmaker who hasn’t been able to get any narrative features off the ground in fifteen years. When he informs Nora that he’s just written his next movie and wants her to star in it, Nora blows up and refuses to even read the script. Gustav, who wrote the lead role specifically for Nora, feels dejected at the prospect of not getting the film made. Enter movie star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who was so moved by a screening of one of Gustav’s older movies that she agrees to star in his new one.
The degree to which Sentimental Value swings in and out of reality is astonishing. It switches from being devastating to being funny in a single line. In one scene, Gustav shows Rachel the room in which her character is going to hang herself, and confesses that it was the very same room in which his mother took her own life. He then tells her that the stool that Rachel is sitting on is the very one that his mother stood on when she did it. Rachel is disturbed, but also enticed by how personal she’s getting with Gustav and, in a way, his mother, who Rachel suspects her character is based on. In the next scene, however, Gustav tells Agnes what he told Rachel about the stool and Agnes responds, “The one from IKEA?” This is a good laugh, but it also says something more profound about the pitfalls of trying to glean an artist’s true intentions. Are they opening up their soul to you? Or are they just f-ing with you? Who’s to say? The answer’s probably somewhere in the middle. That “somewhere in the middle” is where Sentimental Value thrives. It occasionally becomes very close to breaking the fourth wall, but never so much so that it becomes winking. This can be seen in the very casting of Elle Fanning who, less than a month before Sentimental Value was released, was the human star of Predator: Badlands (fun movie!)—the opposite of Sentimental Value and pretty much the type of movie that Rachel Kemp would star in. This is not meant to degrade Fanning’s performance (a performance that should most certainly earn her an Oscar and also most certainly won’t), but it’s a necessary bit of stunt casting that probably wouldn’t carry as much weight if it wasn’t Fanning.
Meanwhile, Nora’s also an artist in her own right, being an acclaimed stage actress. In one scene, after an emotional confrontation, she bursts into a room and cries beside her bed. Reinsve is so committed in this scene and her performance is enough to make anybody tear up, but the final shot of the scene reveals that it was all in front of other performers on a stage. Was it all acting? Or was she merely using her pain in her art? Or is Joachin Trier just f-ing with us? Who’s to say? Reinsve, who decidedly disappears for a good chunk in the middle of Sentimental Value, still has an incredible presence throughout, and you can understand why Trier is so drawn to her as a leading lady.
Eventually, emotions bubble up in the third act. And yet, still the only way Nora and Gustav can truly connect is through their art. But maybe that’s the way things have to be. Sentimental Value isn’t making the case that relating through art the way its protagonists do is healthy (it clearly depicts many of them struggling to maintain meaningful relationships), but it’s also not making the case that they could do it any other way.
It’s a film that touches nerve after nerve and it’s best experienced in a theater. With a friend or a family member, who can laugh with you just as much as they might cry. It may not win every Oscar, and it certainly won’t win every Oscar it deserves, but that doesn’t make it any less one of the absolute best films of the year—perhaps the decade.
