Sentimental Value

I liked it. It did not leave me destroyed like Dancer in the Dark did back then, but it did seem to me a very good, elegant family drama with an ending that really works. Joachim Trier once again moves in a terrain that suits him very well: wounded people, twisted family bonds, silences accumulated over years and that mixture of intelligence, sadness and humor that prevents everything from falling into fake melodrama.

What interested me most is that the film is not only about a father and his daughters, but about everything a family leaves unsaid. There are reproaches, abandonment, pride, guilt and a very human inability to apologize at the right moment. The relationship between Gustav and Nora has something painful because it is not based on one great explosion, but on an accumulation of small absences. He returns with a film, with a house, with a role written for her, but he arrives too late for too many things.

Renate Reinsve is excellent. I already liked her very much since The Worst Person in the World, and here she can be broken without underlining everything. Nora is an actress, daughter, sister and adult woman trying not to become again the girl who waited for something from her father. Her pain is not theatrical even surrounded by theater and cinema; it comes through gestures, resistance and that mixture of rage and desire to be seen.

Stellan Skarsgård is also magnificent, because Gustav could have been simply the selfish, artistic, absent and manipulative father, but he gives him an uncomfortable humanity. He does not absolve him, but he does not turn him into a monster either. He has used cinema to approach others and hide from them at the same time. That is one of the film’s saddest ideas: art as a bridge, but also as an alibi.

The sister, Agnes, brings something essential. The film does not remain only in the main father-daughter clash, but shows another way of surviving the same family. She seems more stable, more practical, more settled in life, but she also carries her gaps. That difference between the two sisters makes the story breathe better and prevents everything from depending on a single wound.

Elle Fanning is interesting within the mechanism, although I also understand anyone who feels her character can shift the emotional center a little. Her presence as an American actress occupying the place Nora does not want or cannot occupy serves to talk about substitution, the market, the desire for recognition and how cinema can appropriate other people’s pain. At times it works; at others, it feels more like a script piece.

The house is almost another character. Not only because of its literal sentimental value, but because it stores memory, family ghosts, childhood, cinema, illness and failure. I liked the idea that spaces are not neutral: you return to a house and also to what you were there, to what was not said, to what broke and to what can still hurt. Trier knows how to film those places as if they were loaded with previous life.

I also appreciated that the film has humor and lightness inside the pain. It could have been a very solemn Nordic drama, one of those that seem to demand reverence in every shot, but it does not fully fall into that. There are moments of irony, human clumsiness, conversations that breathe, characters who are not only victims of their trauma. That makes it closer and more alive.

It does not seem perfect to me. In some stretches it feels prepared to be a great prestige film: broken family, filmmaker father, wounded sisters, symbolic house, foreign actress, cinema within cinema, emotions rising with great precision. Everything is so well placed that the architecture is sometimes visible. It does not bother me too much, because the emotion arrives, but it stops me from seeing it as absolutely spontaneous.

The best thing is that the ending does not force a cheap reconciliation. It has a good ending, as I already mentioned: not because it magically fixes an entire life, but because it finds an honest way to let the characters breathe. Everything need not become clean for something like repair to exist. Sometimes it is enough for someone to look straight at what they avoided looking at, or for an image, a scene or a house to allow what words could not say.

In the end, it remains for me a very good, mature and moving film. It did not break me like the great tragedies one remembers for a lifetime, but it did touch me in the way it talks about fathers, daughters, sisters, art, memory and inherited wounds. It is elegant without being cold, painful without being crushing and very well acted. I may not place it on the highest altar, but I would put it among those family dramas that stay inside with softness and weight.