In 2021, the Norwegian director Joachim Trier came to the Cannes Film Festival with The Worst Person in the World. The movie, a perfect millennial text about a young woman flailing in Oslo, starred Renate Reinsve, introducing her to most of the cinema-going world as an extraordinary talent.
This year on the Croisette, Trier and Reinsve have reunited for Sentimental Value, a triumph of a film that expands upon and deepens their collaboration. It’s also flat out the best thing I saw at the festival, a movie that slowly wrecks you emotionally as it tenderly unpacks a deeply complicated father-daughter relationship.
Just as was the case with The Worst Person in the World to simply describe the plot of Sentimental Value, also co-written by Eskil Vogt, would be to undersell it. Trier’s movies are deceptive in that way. The themes they explore—30-something malaise; messy family dynamics—are not unfamiliar to audiences, but he is able to convey them with such feeling and delicacy they feel transcendent.
That’s why Reinsve is such a perfect partner for him. She has the ability to make you feel the aching humanity of her characters just as he can turn their lives into a film that’s sweepingly novelistic.
Here, Renate plays Nora, a theater actress, who is introduced having a panic attack in a corset before a performance. The sequence is played for laughs, but even though it is funny, in Reinsve’s face you can see this isn’t mere theatrics, there’s a deep pain at the root of her nerves. But then she emerges on stage, the lights harshly flashing in her face, and she is phenomenal.
Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are the daughters of Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a film director of some renown. He left their home when he and their mother broke up and rarely returned. Agnes still speaks to him; Nora rarely does.
Their physical childhood home, with its ornate eaves and red accents looms large in the film. A voiceover explains that Nora, as a child, used to personify it as if it were a living being. Watching you start to feel how alive it is as well, bearing the memories of the generations of their family that existed there.
Gustav returns to that place upon the death of Nora and Agnes’s mother. He’s there to pay his respects, ostensibly, but he requests to meet with Nora. He has a proposition for her: Though he hasn’t made a film in years, he’s written a screenplay to direct. He wants her to be in it. Nora refuses to even take the script.
But Gustav finds another star when he meets Rachel Kemp, a movie star played with a gleaming smile by Elle Fanning. She watches one of his old films at a festival—one which starred Agnes as a child—and is inspired by his work. He casts her in the part Nora is meant to play, and invites her to Norway to begin work on the deeply personal project that draws on the tragedy of his own mother, but is also broader and more mysterious than just straight biography.
Given that Cannes saw the premiere of May December two years ago, you might suspect that Rachel’s arrival means the Sentimental Value will start tackling self-involved Hollywood types. And while there are some jokes about the film industry—including a particularly funny dig at Netflix—Trier is not interested in satire.
Instead, Rachel is wading into something that’s over her head, and Fanning plays her with an earnestness that is at times almost heartbreaking as Gustav tries to shoehorn her into the role meant for Nora. The film is his way of reaching out to the daughter he both innately understands and from whom he is distant because he cannot comprehend the depth of anguish he has caused her.
Skarsgård captures this innate contradiction in Gustav. He is a haughty flirt, clearly seeking to revive his own career, but also perceptive in ways only a great filmmaker is. The inability to reach Nora weighs on him physically, but he shields that with his own self-interest.
He and Reinsve exist on parallel tracks for most of the film. Nora avoids Gustav and she avoids him. She plays Nora as a woman who looks for affection at every turn, vivacious one moment and retreating into herself when isolation feels overwhelming. The fact that it is clear Nora is a great actress only adds to the sense that she and Gustav are more alike than they would care to admit, using performance as a shield for their own emotions. And Lilleaas is lovely as a woman as Agnes, a woman caught between these two people, trying to bridge their gap.
Though Sentimental Value is about the use of art as a tool for communication, it’s not so trite a movie to say that art heals all wounds. But it’s also not a cynical film. Once again, Trier defies convention by finding grace that is so profound it can be walloping.
