REVIEW: "Sentimental Value" - Generational trauma in Norway

This review was originally published by The Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

This complex psychological drama from Scandinavian filmmaker Joachim Trier has emerged as one the most prominent and award-winning films of the year. If you haven’t seen Sentimental Value before hearing all the hype, you may be surprised by its nuanced and unhurried take on very mature topics. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes, swept the European Film Awards, topped critics lists and is now entering the Oscars with nine nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, International Film, Editing and acting nods for all four of its leads. 

Much of the writing about this film has focused on the family relationships. The story follows depressed theater actress Nora (Renate Reinsve) and sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who have a tense relationship with their estranged father, the well-known, self-absorbed filmmaker Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard). When Gustav returns to Oslo after a long absence and asks Nora to star in his new movie, his first in 15 years, she flatly turns him down. He brings in American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) instead and creates a second version of the script in English, but it’s clear that the film – based on the real story of Gustav’s mother’s suicide and set in the family home where Nora and Agnes grew up – is a delicate family affair.

The rapprochement of father and daughters, and the mutual support the sisters have long offered each other in light of their absentee parents, are certainly at the story’s heart. They, like Gustav, are still dealing with the effects of childhood trauma. Moreover, Gustav’s mother experienced acute physical trauma in her adult life as a tortured political prisoner, a grueling storyline that comes to light slowly but resolutely through the film’s occasional third-person narrator and the historical records and shocking photographs Agnes digs up. 

But there’s more to the family’s struggles than just events in their lives; Trier is showing us how trauma and genetic predispositions play out across generations, symbolized in the objects, which may or may not have sentimental value, the sisters are left to sort through after their mother’s death. Nora’s inability to feel joy or accept intimacy, despite a resoundingly successful theater career and an attentive (but married) lover, can’t just be chalked up to her difficulties with her father – even though a montage of their and others’ faces dissolving into each other might seem to suggest otherwise. She’s as fragile as her mother’s heirloom vases.

Sister Agnes shoulders the stress of worrying about Nora’s moods following a prior suicide attempt, and Nora is on the receiving end of Gustav’s regular drunken phone messages. The artistic personalities in the film – Gustav, Nora, Rachel – seem especially vulnerable, open as they are to exploring emotional states, something the three actors demonstrate skillfully and sometimes humorously. (Here, Trier manages to slip in some winking allusions to film industry shifts, from veterans feeling they’ve aged out of meaningful work to Netflix’s stinginess with theatrical releases.)

Trier has tackled mental health themes before, most notably in 2011 literary adaptation August, Oslo 31, a devastating portrayal of a troubled man (played by Anders Danielsen Lie, also in Sentimental Value) on a very personal goodbye tour of his native city. It forms part of what’s known as Trier’s melancholic “Oslo Trilogy,” including Reprise and The Worst Person in the World, all co-written with Eskil Vogt and starring repeat performers like Reinsve and Danielsen Lie.

And Oslo makes the perfect setting for these themes, with its harsh white light casting shallow shadows. Much of the action revolves around the family home, which has a symbolic foundation-to-roof crack running through it and has been the site of little joy. The house is an evocative example of what’s known as Norway’s “dragon style” architecture, according to the Norwegian Film Commission, representing the craft tradition of both the Viking era and medieval wooden churches.

When the house’s interior is redecorated on a soundstage for Gustav’s film, its newly stark modernity and clean lines suggest a possible clearing out of emotional cobwebs and cracks as well. Trier has a deft hand for leading viewers gently but seriously through challenging, layered stories without simple resolutions, and Sentimental Value is no different. Be prepared for a full 130 minutes of that emotional weight. 

Images courtesy of Neon.