Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård anchor a film that explores the fragile bonds of family and art
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
In addition to having a troubled and trouble-making woman named Nora as one of its leads and being another excellent showcase for Norwegian actor Renate Reinsve (“A Different Man”), “Sentimental Value” has plenty about it that invokes modernist Scandinavian playwrights, Ibsen included, and a Nordic house in which generations of a single family lived. All houses are like a theater wherein some form of comedy, tragedy and even grand guignol is endlessly enacted and reenacted. Director Joachim Trier and his frequent writing partner Eskil Vogt (“Thelma”) have configured “Sentimental Value” as the history of a large, dark-painted, mid-century design-decorated Norwegian house (Does it have seven gables?).
Like the house of Usher, the house of the Borgs (I know) has a flaw that was found after the house was built: a meandering crack. When Nora was a child, she and her younger sister Agnes (standout Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as an adult) used to listen to their parents fighting through a stove. Their mother, Sissel (Ida Marianne Vasbotten Klasson), who had recently died of an illness, was a psychotherapist, and their father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a noteworthy film director, is enjoying a retrospective of his work and wants to make a perhaps final film. Nora has grown up to be an acclaimed theater actor. But the unattached, 70-something Gustav hates going to the theater and pretends not to have seen most of her work. In the opening scenes, a panicked diva-ish Nora almost leaves the theater rather than get on the stage to begin a play while everyone waits, sweating bullets.
We get flashbacks to a boy being caught by Nazis and grandmother Karin Borg, a member of the Resistance, being arrested by Nazi-sympathizing Norwegian police, and, we learn later, tortured. The house has many stories to tell, and Trier often asks us to wonder if what we see is “real” or something being acted out on a stage or film set. In search of a lead for his new film after Nora rejects the role, Gustav meets American actor Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who is in Oslo for a film festival with friends. Of course, Nora becomes jealous. Her father told her he had “written it for her.” How could this American usurper take the role? Gustav will shoot in English. But how can Rachel be Nora or some version of Nora or of Gustav’s mother Karin, who took her own life when Gustav was a boy?
At the risk of overindulging in metaphors, “Sentimental Value” is also a hall of mirrors, reflecting art and life, as well as characters and their DNA-connected, house-sharing predecessors. In one scene, Trier and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen (“The Apprentice”) even morph the faces of the main players. Nora, who lives alone and carries on a loveless affair with a married stage manager (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie), suffers from some debilitating depression. She marvels at her younger sister, who appears happy, is married to the supportive Evan (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud), and has a pre-teen son named Erik (Oyvind Hesjedal Loven), whom Gustav wants to play in the film as his younger self. See, mirrors? Agnes is not very happy about Erik being in the film (I’m afraid he’s already in a film). Agnes, who may just be made of sterner stuff and less fragile than her actor-sister Nora, goes to an official-looking place where records of prisoners of World War II are kept and sees photos of the sort of torture her grandmother endured at the hands of Nazis and fellow Norwegians.
Blond Rachel shows up at rehearsal with her hair dyed the same shade of brunette as Nora’s (Reinsve, in her third collaboration with Trier, and Fanning are definite year-end awards contenders for their work in this film). Will this make Rachel more like the real Nora and the Nora that her artist father has sculpted out of the words of a screenplay? At times, writer-director Gustav recalls Shakespeare’s Prospero, who can control the wind and weather and conjure up genie-like spirits out of the air. Can Gustav transform Rachel into some version of his estranged daughter and dead mother? Does art = magic?
“Sentimental Value” is at times also like a new version of Francois Truffaut’s 1973 Nouvelle Vague classic “Day for Night.” We gaze at its mirrors, screens and doppelgangers, and at the center of this new film’s jumbled maze is an artist who seeks a brief end to sorrow in being people other than herself.
‘Sentimental Value’
Rating: R for some language, including a sexual reference, and brief nudity
Cast: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas
Director: Joachim Trier
Writer: Trier, Eskil Vogt
Running time: 2 hours, 13 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters
Grade: A
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