Following the success of global phenomenon The Worst Person in the World, Academy Award-nominee Joachim Trier reunites with BAFTA nominee Renate Reinsve for their universally acclaimed follow-up, Sentimental Value. Winner of the prestigious Cannes Grand Prix award, and featuring career-best performances from Golden Globe winner Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning.
Reinsve plays Nora, a successful stage actress who, along with her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), reunites with their estranged father Gustav Borg (Skarsgård) – a once-renowned film director planning a major comeback with a script based on his family. When Gustav offers Nora the lead role, which she
promptly declines, he turns his attention to Rachel Kemp (Fanning), an eager young Hollywood starlet primed for her big breakthrough. With their fraught dynamics made even more complex, Nora, Agnes and Gustav are each forced to confront their difficult pasts.
The Garden View:
Joachim Trier cements has status as the most successful Norwegian filmmaker of all time with an ambitious and self-reflexive family portrait. As any self-respecting auteur will do at some point, Trier has made a film about filmmaking. This is a subject that, although quite indulgent, opens up Sentimental Value for poignant reflections on creativity, performance, and the meaning of (a broken) home.
Although Trier is a very different filmmaker, there is something faintly Bergman-esque in Sentimental Value. The excavation of family history, the merging of identity, a problematic father, and simply the presence of actors (performing Ibsen no less), all evoke the ghost of the Swedish master. Actually the film that Sentimental Value evokes most strongly is Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, although with less metatextual contortions.
This is confident and powerful filmmaking, carried off by a superb cast, and the best film about a film director since Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory.
