What sort of a cinephile isn’t a sucker for movies about movies? Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier seems to adhere to that same school of thought, and his latest film is both a wonderful movie on its own and an even better one about making the damn things.
“Sentimental Value,” Trier’s follow-up to his beloved “The Worst Person in the World,” reunites Trier with his star Renate Reinsve, and adds in Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and one heck of a wonderful Oslo house to his coterie of major talents. In the film, Skarsgård plays lauded filmmaker Gustav Borg, who long ago abandoned his family (including daughters Nora, played by Reinsve, and Agnes, played by Lilleaas) in pursuit of his career. Turns out, that might have been the wrong choice.
After Nora and Agnes’ mother passes away, Gustav returns to Oslo (and the gorgeous family house that has played home to some of their biggest tragedies) and tries to reestablish himself in his family’s lives. This would be a tough enough ask without Gustav’s other big project: making a film that’s (maybe) about his family, definitely includes the casting of a rising American star (Fanning), and seems entirely designed to make Nora (who has become an actress herself) totally nuts.
As our own David Ehrlich wrote in his Critic’s Pick review of the film out of Cannes, Gustav’s “plan — like everything else in the transcendently moving ‘Sentimental Value,’ a layered masterpiece that ‘The Worst Person in the World’ director Joachim Trier has been working toward for his entire career — is layered with a delicate sense of personal history.”
He added, “In the first of Trier’s films to operate as a family portrait instead of a more focused individual profile, the Borg house will come to assume the gravity of a dying star that gives meaning to the constellation of people who are pulled ever closer towards its orbit. By the time Trier and Eskil Vogt’s dazzling screenplay arrives at a final scene whose power is all the more immense because viewers will see it coming a mile away, we’re so familiar with the house’s energy and layout that any change to it lands with the force of a wrecking ball.”
The film premiered at Cannes in May, where it won the Grand Prix, and went on to play at Telluride, TIFF, and NYFF. Norway has already selected it as its official Oscar entry, and is considered a strong contender in a number of other categories, particularly in the acting categories.
Neon will release “Sentimental Value” in theaters on Friday, November 11. Check out the film’s first trailer below.