Joachim Trier’s ‘Sentimental Value’ Turns Familial Grief Into Disarming Comedy

Days before the end of a Cannes Film Festival marked by stories of pain and misanthropy, Norway’s Joachim Trier injected the Croisette with a much-needed boost of lightness. 

Sentimental Value, Trier’s follow-up to the electric The Worst Person in the World, covers its fair share of heavy themes, touching on mental illness, intergenerational trauma and parental neglect. But it’s hard to overstate how pleasurable a viewing experience Sentimental Value is. Trier injects this drama with natural humour, illustrating Oslo with warm, grainy textures and soft light, and capturing performances from a remarkable ensemble that includes Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas.

At first glance, Sentimental Value is the simple story of a family and a house. The opening montage unveils the history of the stately period villa—with cracks in the walls and plenty of metaphorical ghosts—in which Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Ibsdotter Lilleaas) grew up. Trier then leaps to the present, where we meet Nora backstage before a performance of Medea; she’s a relatively successful actress battling, in a breathlessly funny scene, a particularly chaotic attack of stagefright. Reinsve’s physical comedy as she commands her costar, played by Anders Danielsen Lie, to kiss her then slap her, builds on the deftness she displayed in The Worst Person in the World.

The family home is now a bare, cavernous space. The sisters’ mother has just died, and their distant father Gustav (Skarsgård) shows up at the funeral unexpectedly. He’s a successful veteran film director who is equal parts infuriating and pitiable. It becomes clear within moments that he barely knows how to communicate with his daughters, despite being evidently capable of pouring honest emotion into his films. Nora, who grapples intermittently with depression, resents him for his infidelities against their mother and neglect of his children. Agnes appears more well-adjusted to the outside eye, with a husband, kid and stable career as an archival historian, but it later becomes clear she has her own entanglements and confusion regarding her father’s mercurial parenting.

Trier weaves these layers together in a profound exploration of how a family’s story is different for each member, especially so in a family of artists, but the underlying emotional truth always has a strange way of turning out the same. Gustav has written a script about a suicidal mother, and he wants Nora to play the lead role—an obvious surrogate for his own mother, no less because he wishes to film it in the family home. Nora refuses in disgust, but when she later reads the script, she’s shocked to discover how closely it hems to her own tumultuous life, even though she thought her father paid her little attention. Elle Fanning then enters the picture as Rachel Kemp, a famous American actress who Gustav hires to play the lead instead, and she slowly becomes a sort of surrogate daughter with whom he can be more open and honest than his real children.

Fanning plays Kemp with a remarkable vulnerability, as Rachel grows increasingly unsure of her position in the film. A sweetly comical scene shows her trying to perfect a Norwegian accent by asking for “three glasses of juice.” Despite her insecurities, she’s unaware of how her outsider nature unlocks something in both Nora and Agnes, who are propelled by Gustav’s film towards a reckoning with their buried trauma. Reinsve is fantastic, but Ibsdotter Lilleaas delivers the film’s revelatory performance as the quieter sister, an archival historian who goes digging into the very real, tragic history of Gustav’s mother.

Trier is fascinated in the power of art as a channel for truth, but also the way it can distract and obfuscate. In one brilliant scene, Nora leaves a family dinner in a huff, and we watch her return home and sink down onto her bed in tears. The camera pans out to reveal this as another of Nora’s plays; the scenes were actually unconnected, and though Nora may be unlocking some buried emotion, she’s using it to pretend to be someone else.

The script drives its characters towards some astoundingly affecting confrontations—between director and muse, sister and sister, daughter and father—which hit on a molecular level. Trier and his co-writer Eskil Vogt are experts at punctuating natural, conversational dialogue with startlingly profound lines, like when Gustav tells Nora that “it’s hard to love someone so angry.” In Sentimental Value,  Trier and Vogt have created an ensemble of characters who, weighed down by their emotional baggage, find it hard to love anyone at all—but they know that both for each other and for their art, they must try, try and try again.

Sentimental Value is released in French cinemas on August 20.