Trier, but not that one: what the sensational film “Sentimental Value” will show 0 6

The film “Sentimental Value,” which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, is hitting the screens. The film was directed by Joachim Trier — a distant relative of the great and terrible Lars von Trier. While Lars battles Parkinson's disease, Joachim, the creator of festival-acclaimed films such as “Reprise,” “Oslo, August 31st,” “Thelma,” “Louder Than Bombs,” and “The Worst Person in the World,” is increasingly taking leading positions in European and world cinema. Norway has nominated his new film, which received a 19-minute standing ovation at Cannes, for an Oscar, and it has every chance of winning the prestigious statuette.

In terms of genre, “Sentimental Value” is a family drama closely tied to the problems of creativity and elegantly woven into the traditions of Scandinavian art. A significant part of the film takes place in an old mansion, the walls of which remember the fates of several generations of the Borg family. The house serves as an impressive backdrop for the unfolding action. Prepared viewers will easily catch echoes of Ibsen’s “A Doll's House” in the film. It is no coincidence that the main character is named Nora (this is the third successful role for Renate Reinsve in Joachim's films). She works in theater, performing classics, including plays by the “Russian Strindberg,” as Chekhov was once called.

Nora is an experienced actress, nearing forty, but she sometimes suffers from panic attacks at premieres. The film begins with a temperamentally shot scene where Nora, after the third bell, is in a fit of hysteria and literally gasps for air, tearing off her tight dress. Costume designers and a doctor are called to her, but Nora breaks free from them like a willful horse. She finds her married boyfriend backstage and asks him to either make love to her immediately or at least hit her hard to break her psychological stupor. The bewildered lover chooses the latter. Together, they manage to calm Nora down and bring her on stage, where she reigns like a goddess.

In everyday life, Nora's nervous breakdowns take on the character of melancholy, with a mountain of unwashed dishes and a disconnected phone. Her emotional fluctuations are the result of poor heredity, female loneliness, and psychological traumas experienced in childhood. Nora still cannot forgive her father, a film director, for abandoning the family with two small children and for not showering them with attention since then. He hasn’t even properly seen the plays featuring his daughter, justifying this by saying that theater is a dusty, stale art.

Unexpectedly for everyone, her father appears at the doorstep on the day of his ex-wife's funeral. Once, Gustav Borg (brilliantly played by Stellan Skarsgård, who starred in six of Lars von Trier's main films) was famous. He managed to cast his younger daughter Agnes (the incredible Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas with eyes as radiant as those of a Tolstoy heroine) in the war film that made them famous. Agnes did not become an actress; she chose quiet family happiness and the guardianship of her older lonely sister, with whom she has a close emotional bond.

Gustav, at the peak of success, left his wife, children, and home, embarking on an indefinite creative binge. Over the years, however, he lost his former shine and has been scraping by on random projects for the last 15 years. But, due to his serious age, deteriorating health, and failures that can be healing for moral health, he has begun to reconsider his views on “sentimental” family values.

This time, Gustav arrives at the house with a script for a personal, confessional film that he intends to shoot in the family nest. He wrote it about his mother, a Resistance participant who endured torture in Nazi dungeons and subsequently committed suicide. Gustav wants Nora to play this role. With his director's and paternal instincts, he senses her sharp, nervous talent. Proud Nora, wounded by her father's years of selfishness, refuses without even reading the manuscript. Gustav reluctantly offers the role to a Hollywood star (Elle Fanning is delightful in a role that is essentially herself), who dreams of serious work. Enchanted by Borg's early films and the power and depth of his new script, she begins to inhabit the foreign role and settle into the foreign home, listening to its legends and dramas, whispers and screams...

Joachim's film does not shine with visual flourishes. It is shot in a leisurely narrative, old-fashioned, somewhat theatrical manner, as mentioned above. But the multilayered script, written by the director together with his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt, is tightly constructed. The characters of the four main characters are well-developed, and the well-chosen ensemble of actors has much to play with and where to unfold. The intense intrigue of the family-creative conflict keeps viewers in growing emotional tension. And it explodes in the finale like a bomb.

Essentially, “Sentimental Value” is a kind of inversion of Ingmar Bergman's famous “Autumn Sonata.” Only there, the selfish, pampered, and cold mother-pianist played by Ingrid Bergman was clarifying difficult relationships with her two daughters, whom, by her own admission, she never loved. Here, in a similar situation, is a father-director who, on the contrary, is trying, albeit belatedly, sometimes clumsily, and even absurdly (consider his gift of DVDs of the films “The Piano Teacher” and “Irreversible” to his little grandson) to restore long-broken family ties. And his efforts seem not to be in vain.

Attentive viewers will find direct quotes and veiled references to “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “Whispers and Cries,” “Persona,” and other Bergman masterpieces, with which Joachim Trier is either in dialogue or in polemic. But if we assume that a “new Bergman” has emerged in Scandinavian cinema, then this is a Bergman unafraid of troubling, depressive themes, yet at the same time tender, comforting, merciful, and compassionate. His new film provokes not only serious reflections on fathers and children, family and historical traumas, the pains and joys of creativity, but also grateful, bright tears.

Joachim Trier was born in 1974 in Norway. He received his education at the European Film College (Copenhagen). After graduation, he worked on commercials and television. His debut in feature film was the movie “Reprise,” which premiered on July 3, 2006, as part of the main competition program at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. On September 9, 2006, Joachim went to the 31st Toronto International Film Festival, where he positively presented his project; Harvey and Bob Weinstein became interested in the film and helped produce it in the USA. His second work, “Oslo, August 31st,” solidified his status as an emerging director and brought him wide recognition in Europe and numerous awards. In his next film, “Louder Than Bombs,” starred Isabelle Huppert, Jesse Eisenberg, and Gabriel Byrne. The film “Thelma” achieved success at film festivals around the world.