STELLAN SKARSGARD AND RENATE REINSVE IN SENTIMENTAL VALUE Forgiveness The aging Norwegian filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) turns up at the ancestral home (itself a character, through a voiceover early in
Sentimental Value) with a new film script he has written, his first in fifteen years, that he wants his daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), a stage actress, to star in. He also wants the young son Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven) of his other daughter Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) to be in the film. Nora refuses and Agnes refuses. Gustav fails in his scheme to make his movie instead in English, for Netflix, starring a newly successful American actress, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who agrees because she's an admirer. Another major health issue arises. But ultimately through a reading of the script things are hashed out.
Not everyone loves Trier's
Sentimental Value. Mike D'Angelo, whom I often cite because of the clarity and bluntness of his views, and whose rankings I refer to because of the borderline absurd but nonetheless impressive precision as well as severity of them, currently places
Sentimental Value 80th among the 88 for this year he has so far ranked on his
site. Peter Bradshaw of the
Guardian, whom I also often refer to, calls
Sentimental Value "baggy." Well, I don't know how many critics make it number one, but Brother Bro of The Oscar Expert
thought it was the most enthusiastically received by the Cannes audience, and the Cannes jurors gave it the number two prize, the Grand Prix. I have some reservations about
Sentimental Value (see below). But for me it's got to be one of the year's best. It's about forgiveness, or at least that's one of its main themes. So let's be forgiving of
it. My ranking of it among the year's best relates to many things. I love Joachim Trier's films and this is one of the important ones, even if it's not my favorite.
To begin with this is a movie that does right what
Hamnet gets badly wrong, about ways that artists struggle with their responsibilities as humans and as parents, about how they try to work out their salvation or simply try to understand their lives through their work, but above all simply take the raw material their lives give them in wholly new directions. We don't actually see or hear much of Gustav's new script. But this film ends with filming one scene, a memorable, but now ambiguous one.
The movie doesn't begin with any of this. It begins with a voiceover that talks about the big house Nora and Agnes grew up in, which goes back generations in Gustav's family. His mother committed suicide in this house. Then there is a memorable, agonizing scene about Nora, who evidently is both an excellent actress and suffers from terrible stage fright.
Trier and his regular coscripter Eskil Voit write wonderful screenplays, witty, specific, full of life's "stuff," with extremes positive and negative. Trier's films have been triumphs through the magnificent actor Anders Danielson Lie, and lately, with Renate Reinsve, her breakthrough being Trier's last film
The Worst person in the World (2021). Danielsen Lie features in Trier's sparkling debut
Reprise (2006), in his gloomy, shattering
Oslo, August 31st (2011) and the female-centric, witty
The Worst Person in the World, which together have been dubbed his "Oslo trilogy." Trier, always with Eskil Vogt and with these and other great actors, have set out something unique in world cinema that's probably partly also distinctively Norwegian, a vigor, an intelligence, an alacrity for simultaneously taking on both the most challenging aspects and the greatest joys of a life. I saw that in a softer, teen-focused, different format way in the four-"season" 2015–2017 online TV series "Skam," also Norwegian, also set in Oslo.
D'Angelo starts his Patreon-only review with how he "cracked up" at how the reappearing Gustav gifts little Erik DVDs of
Irreversible and
The Piano Teacher , a gesture as hilarious as it is weirdly imappropriate for a kid, also dated since now, a kid accesses movies without need of DVDs. But
Sentimental Value grabs you in other ways besides its humorous, somehow forgiving, picture of how Gustav, who basically wasn't there for the raising of his daughters and now wants to use them, is an asshole and yet we can't really not like him. He's so blatant. He asks Nora to star in his film yet admits he walked out of her most important play; it's funny how he justifies this.
Stellen Skarsgård is selfless and subtle in his handling of the role of Gustav. Renate Reinsve is too. So that matter is Elle Fanning; sho avoids being either gushy about how much she admires this art film director Gustav Borg or overly weepy, though she does weep, when things go wrong. When something is put together well it just plays itself. There is a kind of natural ease, like the renaissance Italian concept of
sprezzatura.When Peter Bradshaw calls
Sentimental Value "baggy" he has a point in the whole digression about Gustav's attempt to make his new film in English. It's miraculously but ridiculously produced by Netflix. With everybody Norwegian except the American star, Rachel. She agrees to do it because she admires Gustav so much, especially a film she comes to a revival screening of, that features Agnes as a girl. What Trier and Vogt are trying to say comes close to too complicated, though their humor and typically light touch, as well as the cast's restraint, help to compensate. In the end this is a film about forgiveness that asks us also to forgive
it. It's also one of the rare films - despite my Pauline Kael rule that if you watch well once should e enough - that requires multiple viewings and repays them. And you should certainly view it, with the other best films of the year.
Also recommended, another Norwegian film comically about the opposite thing from forgiveness, revenge, Hans Petter Moland's wicked and hilarious 2016
In Order of Disappearance, in which Stellan Skarsgård also has the leading role. Gives you some perspective.
Sentimental Value, 133 mins., premiered at Cannes May 2025, winning the Grand Prix, thereafter seen at many international film festivals including Telluride, Toronto, New York, and BFI London. In theaters now, will be online Dec. 23.
Metacritic rating: 86%.
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