Jason Bailey
We first meet Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) — as an adult, at least — in the middle of a backstage breakdown. It’s opening night, and it’s time to bring down the house lights on the already impatient audience, and Nora won’t come out of her dressing room. They finally get her backstage, and she won’t go out. The audience waits. Then she’s back in the dressing room, ripping off her costume, because she “can’t breathe” in it. Finally, agonizingly, with literal duct tape holding her dress together, she goes onstage — and she’s brilliant. You don’t have to have a theatrical background for this sequence to play like a nightmare, and yet, against all odds, its outcome is a feeling of overwhelming sympathy for Nora. That’s a neat trick, and not the last one Joachim Trier pulls in his new film Sentimental Value.
It marks a reunion for Trier and Reinsve, who starred in his last film, The Worst Person in the World, about a woman who was very much not the worst person in the world. Neither is Nora, but Reinsve once again shows a particular flair for playing women who are, at least at first blush, impossible. This time, she has a valid excuse: it’s an inherited trait. Her father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) is a filmmaker of some note, though it’s been quite some time since he’s been able to put the money together for a narrative feature. We sense the discomfort between them the first time they’re together onscreen, at the post-funeral repast for her mother and his ex-wife; Trier and Eskil Vogt’s screenplay quickly and succinctly captures the strained quality of forced conversation with a distant parent.
Soon, they have something else to disagree about: he’s written her a leading role in his new film. “You’re the only one who can play it,” he assures her, between cruel and casual cuts at her stage and television work; he’s mean about those things simply because he can be, and Nora responds, understandably, “I’m not having any part of this.” Not long after, at a film festival, one of his retrospective screenings is attended by hot young American starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who invites him to dinner and quickly agrees to take on the role his daughter turned down. And that’s when things really get interesting.
Like Worst Person, much of Sentimental Value can be described as closely observed character study. Nora is a thorny, tricky woman, who acts to escape her own skin, and who compartmentalizes her fear of intimacy by having an affair with a married co-star. Her character is given extra shadings by her interactions with her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who has a much more agreeable relationship with their father, which creates more friction between the sisters.
Skarsgård and Reinsve are an inspired pairing; both are masters of subtext, so even their most innocuous interactions are fully loaded, one dismissive glance from a full-on row (Him: “You two turned out fine.” Her: “How can you tell? You hardly know us.”). They’re the bold-faced names here, but don’t sleep on the fabulous Lilleaas, who ends up carrying some of the heaviest emotional weight of the picture. And Fanning is terrific, resisting the the surely temping inclination to look down on the character, to play her as a vapid parody of a movie star. (You can tell Trier loves actors by the way she’s written, with such integrity and sensitivity.)
There’s an incredible moment, right at the beginning of the very last scene, where you realize how he’s going to end it, and that it’s a perfect choice, the only way to conclude it, and he does. And then it goes on just one beat longer, and it’s somehow even more divine. The way Trier brings this story and these characters together, the manner in which he weaves a seemingly irreparable rupture into a story of harmony and understanding, feels like something akin to a miracle. The best movies are those that start about one thing, and by their end, you realize they’re about every thing. Sentimental Value is about family, yes. And then it’s also about depression and art and God and resentment and sex and longing and love and beauty and movies. Y’know — the important things.
A+
“Sentimental Value” is out this weekend in limited release.
