She is jogging in a cemetery. Certainly, a Norwegian cemetery, urban, green and sunny, but still. Nora, a theater actress who triumphs on stage, but faces cataclysmic stage fright, is not doing very well. His mother has just died, but it’s not just that, far from it.
At the funeral in the large family home where she welcomed loved ones in the company of her sister Agnes, there is the arrival of her father, Gustav, who has been gone for a long time. Between him, Nora, Agnes, her little boy, a multitude of affects, unsaid things, looks, signals immediately circulate in all directions.
Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) is a great filmmaker who hasn’t filmed for a long time. He offers the leading role in what should be his last film to Nora (Renate Reinsve), who sharply refuses. A few sentences, the electricity in the young woman’s eye, the cunning weariness in that of the old man, the scene is of great violence with almost nothing.
Because, like almost everything in this film, the main thing is elsewhere. On the side of ghosts perhaps, who sneak onto theater stages, onto cinema screens, into the pages of a script or the archive files of an ancient story of resistance and torture, failing to be admitted by those they nevertheless haunt.
Sixth feature film by Norwegian director Joachim Trier, presented at the Cannes Film Festival in May and awarded a Grand Prix on this occasion (it could without injustice have received the Palme d’Or), Sentimental value is like this. Father, daughters, past, present, unsaid, he tells stories known and approached a hundred times by the cinema. And it’s as if everything is reinventing itself.
An example: it has become commonplace to say, about many films, that a place (a city, a house) is one of the main characters. Joachim Trier starts from there, his film opens with an explicit choice of the large family home in Oslo as a character, declines and unfolds its functional and narrative uses, highlights its status as a character, to make it something else.
Three women and a house
This place, as imaginary as it is real, a fairytale house on the outside and a succession of white cubes on the inside, is less central to the story than it would seem. But it functions as a resource for other circulations, trafficking in secrets and travels through the ages. Cinematographically constructed as a dramatic power by displacing what so many productions have already done, it gives access to other emotions, to other sensations.
It will be the same with the relationship between the father and his two daughters, between life and the show, even between European auteur cinema embodied by Gustav and Hollywood showbiz personified by the star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who wants the role refused by Nora.
This way of retracing in a new way – rich in infinite singular harmonics – paths amply marked by literature, theater and cinema, is the precious offering of the film. It owes a lot to interpretation where each gesture, each look, each silence “expresses” – as they say – an emotion, but is never limited to it.
Each in a distinct register, this is what the very beautiful acting proposals of the three actresses produce. Alongside Renate Reinsve, whom Joachim Trier reunites with after their fruitful collaboration in Julie (in 12 chapters) four years ago, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning also made Sentimental value achieves this delicate miracle of going through recognizable situations one by one, in a way that always reinvents itself.
Stellan Skarsgård as a great aging filmmaker, despite the finesse of his acting and the devious or naive corners of Gustav Borg, is undoubtedly the least interesting character on a human level, while he is essential on a dramatic level.
It is possible to perceive here a singular and stimulating form of feminism, not so much by attacking the male protagonist, but by shifting the emotional center of gravity, what we could call the fictional prestige of the character, to the benefit of women.
Ingmar Bergman in mirror
Contrary to appearances, Sentimental value is not a film about cinema, or about the making of a film. In a more subtle and more fertile way, it is a film which says how much cinema helps us to understand ourselves and others, by doubling what it does itself, as a film, with what its characters do. It is twice a test of truth, in Joachim Trier’s film and in what is taking place, or not, around Gustav Borg’s project.
Likewise, the scenario written by Gustav is made up of a mechanism which is also that of the scenario of Sentimental value: telling the story of one person while appearing to tell the story of another. And the presence, claimed, of echoes of numerous other already existing films contributes to this underlying richness, which continues to surface in so many ways.
In this maze of signs, references to the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman are legion, Wild strawberries (1957) to Persona (1966) and Autumn Sonata (1978). These are less about homages or quotes than a way of nourishing the imagination of a film in which each and every person is invited to do what he or she wants, based on their own baggage, cinephile, cultural, but above all personal.
The new film from the author ofOslo, August 31 (and the unfairly misunderstood Thelma) is thus a very beautiful work of freedom. From the sovereign omniscience of the voice-over to the skin-deep changes of register, the various ways of refocusing points of view, of circulating in time, of leaving interstices – materialized by brief black screens – in the unfolding of a story that is nevertheless always readable, multiply the accesses.
Without stylistic trickery or spectacular smoke and mirrors, Joachim Trier thus finds the right note of an original tone, where neither the violence of affects, nor the humor of the gaze, nor a sort of undeceived benevolence are absent. But above all by leaving plenty of space for whoever is looking.
