Euronews Culture's Film of the Week: 'Sentimental Value' - Healing family burns through art

There’s a Norwegian proverb, brent barn skyr ilden, that translates as: “A burned child avoids the fire.”

This is at the heart of Joachim Trier’s latest seriocomedy, Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value), as the character Nora (Renate Reinsve) has been burned by her father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård).

A famed director, he abandoned both Nora and her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) when they were young, to better prioritise his career. He comes back into their lives at their mother’s wake, and instead of emotional support, presents his eldest with a proposition.

In a bid to revive his career and secure his artistic legacy, he’s written an autobiographical screenplay. Considering Nora is a gifted stage actress, Gustav wants her to play the role of his mother, who took her own life in the family home in Oslo. He even wants to shoot the film within the girls’ childhood home.

“I wrote it for you and you’re the only one who can play it,” he tells his daughter about his comeback project, reaching out to her in the only way he knows how. Clumsily.

After little consideration, she refuses the part: “I can’t work with him. We can’t really talk.”

This prompts Gustav to cast up-and-coming Hollywood actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) instead, who he meets during a retrospective of his films. Not a move that will help mend the emotional rift with his daughters...

Four years after Reinsve won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her performance in Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, the Norwegian duo reunite for this tale that explores dysfunctional family dynamics. It’s a winning combination, not just because Sentimental Value won this year’s Cannes Grand Prix (essentially second place to the Palme d’Or), but because Reinsve is, as always, a magnetic screen presence.

Convincing as a talented actress suffering anxiety attacks and having an affair with married actor Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie, a regular Trier player), Reinsve manages to convey both desperation at the fact she has semi-followed in her father’s artistic footsteps as well as an unaffected distance Nora clearly uses as a defence mechanism. Like Julie in The Worst Person in the World or Elizabeth in Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s Armand (2024), Reinsve makes her characters come off as real, flawed and manages to hint at layers of buried trauma without toppling into mawkishness.

As for Skarsgård, he is fascinating as the estranged father you want to hate. It’s just that the actor won’t let you.

Gustav’s casting request becomes increasingly problematic considering this is a self-involved man who didn’t watch his daughter grow up. He is also stubborn in his inability to directly address the sins of his past and instead seeks a form of reconciliation through art – his film seeming like the cathartic buoy he clings onto, convinced that reality can be mended through artificiality. And yet, through Skarsgård’s talents as a performer, you never doubt his genuineness or his charming ham-handedness, as seen in a hilarious, cinephile-tickling scene in which he earnestly offers DVDs of The Piano Teacher and Irréversible as an outrageously inappropriate birthday present to Agnes’ 10-year-old son, Erik (Oyvind Hesjedal Loven). Again, this is a man who leans on art to attempt to connect with others on an emotional level. It’s a frustrating trait that barely masks his inability to articulate his feelings, but not one you ever judge him for.

The fascinating dynamic between the father and daughter (as well as the moving scenes between Nora and Agnes) are not only down to the actors, but also a terrific script co-written by Trier and his longtime screenwriting partner Eskil Vogt. Both create nuanced characters and balance the intergenerational family trauma with healthy lashings of caustic humour throughout. Without sacrificing knotty relationships through comedy, Trier and Vogt ensure that Sentimental Value achieves true emotional resonance. 

As affecting and meticulously orchestrated as the film is, there are a few bum notes along the way.

Sentimental Value can get bogged down by an excessive amount of time spent on the production of Gustav’s (Netflix financed) film, as well as several detours regarding the trauma the Borg family inherited from Nazi persecution. As vital as the background is and how generational history feeds into the importance of the house in this film, as a living thing that both internalises and externalises its occupants’ states of being, a lot of this information feels a little too literal at times. Moreover, these digressions and some overt references to Ingmar Bergman – especially when the faces of the father and his two daughters morph into each other at one point - detract from the film’s core: the importance of tenderness and the vulnerability necessary for relationships to surpass burns and begin to heal.

That said, and despite a predictable denouement you’ll have guessed by the end of the first act, Sentimental Value does come together as mature ode to trying one’s best and how, in some cases, life and art can converge to create something bigger. And hardened is your heart if that luminous and subtly devastating last shot doesn’t tease your tear ducts.

As they say, etter regn kommer sol. “After rain comes sun.”

Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value) premiered at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It is currently out in cinemas in France and Belgium. It continues its theatrical rollout in Norway, Sweden and Greece this month and hits cinemas in US, UK and Germany in December.