Sentimental Value

Movies that have singular ideas : Bergman's persona, Tarkovsky's the mirror and clarinet soundtrack from Woody Allen. These are few of the blatant visual thefts that sentimental value steals from.
Sentimental Value, on the other hand, feels like a lot of movies I’ve seen before: movies about dysfunctional bourgeois families where divorce looms in the background like original sin of fathers. While chock full of pathos, these films tend to be fairly formulaic, assuring by the end that, however broken, the home is still where the heart is, and families, however fraught, are always worth fighting for.

I don't necessarily believe in the feelings expressed here.

The actress preparing for the scenes looks so shitty. I laughed in May December when Julianne Moore talks about preparing as if it was a big holy process and it was a soft porn movie that she was shooting. The conflict between the two was funny. 

But when you read the interviews with Reinsve, you get the feeling that those poor bastards really believe they really captured something essential about the craft of acting and creating, really hit the nail on the head with the million dead end story lines. An actress who is very withdrawn and neurotic in her own life, bad at communicating her own needs. But when she's on stage she can hide in the character and come alive.

We have the entitled patriarch who wants to turn things around (reminiscent of both Paul Thomas and Wes Anderson); an indignant daughter who can’t let the past die (redolent of roles Tilda Swinton has played in more than one film). In a more grandiose turn, the trauma of suicide is set against the trauma of Nazi torture against members of the Norwegian Resistance, which is set against the trauma of obsolescence as an aging auteur. Rather than prioritize the emotional potency of individual character arcs, as Trier did in Thelma (2017) or The Worst Person in the World, Sentimental Value continually circles back to Big Themes for a sense of gravitas—yet another being meta-theatricality, as foregrounded by Nora’s performances bookending scenes, along with the Ibsenesque tenor of the name itself. So the seems to be taking it a bit too seriously as if to say : When you review films, please keep in mind that if you give negative reviews, you are criticizing the themes that the films represent. And thus the foundations of Nordic chamber drama itself. " Cannes awards please! I think this middlebrow film does not deserve these plaudits.


All the characters in the movie (not Stellan Skarsgård -author self insert character) praise how great the script is and how excited everyone is to be doing it (based on the script alone) and how it wasn't at all what they imagined. "You've never dealt with this theme so personally. So direct. You've got to make this movie. And make it your way."This is the absolution given in that film for its own pathetic grandeur.
Asking that you take the big themes into account.

Not to mention the cheap metalevel style of jokes about Netflix, where else movies are shown anywhere but in theaters, is a pathetic mockery of the realities of the cinema distribution of contemporary world. Not to mention that sentimental value is going to be shown for most people watching on Mubi.

There's good in this film too. Good: four people talk across one another and try to avoid each other for years without learning anything or changing anything. But also in the end everything is fine and everyone gets their own emotional resolution.