Sentimental Value kicks off with a scene that feels both Bergmanic and like a fairy tale — the kind of film Woody Allen spent at least a decade or so trying to make and falling short every time. It’s an art film that plays like a mainstream crowd-pleaser, a drama that knows how to find laughs, and a movie about the movies that has a comfy seat ready for people who don’t really give a shit about the highways and byways of filmmaking. It’s a story that anyone can relate to, featuring a house that’s so much a central character that you just know Wes Anderson will be sick with envy.
Director/co-writer Joachim Trier (along with co-writer Eskil Vogt) makes a specific choice to frame things with this specific house; an anchor for generations of experiences and emotions that incarnate how perspectives on families always extend both into the past and into the future — and that’s true from Brontë to V.C. Andrews to today.
So as we get to know the Borg family, it’s with a slightly expanded sense of perspective; we grow to know them as they occur within this specific space, and how their lives refract against those who came before them. And the Borgs — actress Nora (Renate Reinsve), her little sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), now a wife and mother, and their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) — all bring things to the table that every adult can find resonance in. More often than not, when a filmmaker decides to make a movie about forgiving (or not) one’s parents, that’s a giant clanging alarm. But forgiveness is not an act pivot in a screenplay or a simple knot to tie; it’s a process. And whatever one thinks of filmmaker Gustav Borg and his long-ago fame, his current obscurity, and how and why he left his two daughters behind, rest assured that this film is going to get into it.
You’ve got to love a movie that finds soundtrack space for both Roxy Music and Pastor T.L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir. There’s an intertextual dialogue happening between most of the arts in this narrative and in this family, and it builds a fascinating space — it really is the house in your neighborhood that always has something artsy happening, and a ticket to this film is like an invite over for the day. There’s going to be some amazing things and some heartwrenching things, some laughs and some betrayals, and you’re there for all of it: the joys that grow in strength from being shared and the moments that leave you feeling like a trespasser who just wants to fade away. It’s an incredible film, this one.
If you saw Trier and Reinsve’s previous collaboration, 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, you know they’ve got a gift for balancing contradictory emotional states and tones with ease, punching through expectations and delivering stylized moments that hit as real as documentary and feel somehow fanciful and expansive. It’s a fascinating tightrope walk, and Sentimental Value never makes a false step.
It’s also a great sibling movie. Reinsve and Lilleaas both deliver incredible performances, but they also feel completely believable as sisters. Elle Fanning as Hollywood actress Rachel Kemp represents a lot in this film; she’s exceptional as an outsider who has an eye for clarity and sincerity that helps expand our means of observing the Borgs. Just as she is in the recently released Predator: Badlands, she’s very good as a point-of-entry character for audience members looking to find a way into the material. All three of these women are delivering award-worthy work. And Skarsgård is at the top of his game in a remarkable slow-burn realization that maybe he is too old for this. Maybe it’s not worth Netflix compromises. Maybe the game is — not suited to the young, per se, but designed for those who aren’t so set in their ways? Isn’t that always the question in the collaborative arts? Finding that balance point between vision and execution?
When you put your emotions into your work, whether screen or stage, how does that color your interactions with other artists? It’s not a zero-sum equation, where there’s only so much energy you can put into art, but there is a sort of second array of emotional interaction that happens between artists, and that’s fascinating. It may be something that normies don’t even think about — in which case, this film is a peek behind the emotional curtain. But it’s absolutely a hook that I think resonates in a lot of cities and arts-based communities, and it’s certainly something that hits a little differently here in Nashville.
Trier and Vogt are very good at revelation — not in the grand biblical sense, but in the way that each of the characters is granted a moment or two when things clamber into place for them, changing them just a little bit. And we’re given this gracious, omniscient third-person perspective that lets us observe the long-term effects of how little shifts in behavior, when spread around, are cumulative. Never has a film’s choice of birthday gifts for a child delivered such a moment of inappropriate recognition and uproarious laughter.
There’s also something going on in the polyglot nature of these characters, where what gets said and in what language gives us insight into how they work and process moments — it may not be of concrete use to anyone who isn’t a linguist or who can’t leap between languages, but it’s still telling us a lot. Because of that, we understand how intimate our observations are allowed to be, and we have to assemble these lives that radiate from this remarkable house as we’re going.
There’s a very fine line between feeling seen and feeling like a work of art is telling you about yourself. Those aren’t the same feeling, and it’s hard to imagine another film this year being able to thread that needle, and also doing so in a way that isn’t devastating, but rather invigorating. Sentimental Value makes you want to do better in your own circumstances; and more than that, it makes you want to watch it again.
