The Familial Meta-Drama of Sentimental Value

Joachim Trier stakes his claim as a master of modern social cinema.

Joachim Trier does not shy away from the contemporary moment. Where modern filmmakers often ensconce themselves in the comfortable distance of satire, farce, and irony in an effort to apprehend our febrile zeitgeist, Trier faces the challenge head-on with a formidable solemnity. His latest work, Sentimental Value, reinforces this approach and surely cements his place atop the current era of Nordic auteurs, following the similarly ebullient yet ponderous The Worst Person in the World. Recently screened at the 63rd New York Film Festival, the film dances with meta drama in its approach to themes of familial disruption and anomie, deftly layered and expertly animated by a coterie of world-class performers. Familiar Trier players Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie are back in the mix (the former having taken home a Best Actress prize at Cannes in 2021), aside from two brilliant additions to the Norwegian director’s cast – Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning. Famously averse to centering performance (“I think the most personal thing you do as a filmmaker is where you put your camera, how you perceive things…mise en scene is the most important aspect….I hear a lot of young filmmakers talking about, you know, ‘I’m all about performance, the camera can just be random.’ That worries me.”) Trier has perhaps finally discovered an ensemble that has tipped the scales of his filmmaking towards the weight of physical expression.

The film paints a portrait of a family in various stages of disarray. Skarsgard plays the imperious director Gustav Borg, whose familial legacy includes the desertion of his wife Sissel and daughters, Nora and Agnes. Reinsve’s Nora is an actress on the precipice of psychological collapse, falling prey to panic attacks and conducting an affair with her married co-star (Danielsen Lie) in a production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Gustav returns to the family home with a plan to film his latest project – a biopic about his mother, casting American star Rachel Kemp (Fanning) in the lead. All the while, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) conducts independent research about the nature of her grandmother’s experience at the hands of Nazi torture squads. The themes are typically heavy, yet the film progresses with an air of subtlety and self-possession. The interwoven strands of identity, family, and psychological despair build upon the meditations of other Nordic auteurs like Ibsen and Bergman – and within this thematic scope, Trier expertly deploys mise en absyme, the connective fascia that envelops this moody yet grounded work.

Sentimental Value is, perhaps unsurprisingly, given its explicit referential tendencies, also deeply concerned with the state of art and its relationship to society and the self, the transactional locus point of our tradeoffs of increasing great social and cultural import. Here, the family is ripe for exploration. What is a family dynamic if not a microcosm of the forces that swirl around and through us on a collective level, a unit both a world unto itself and a subject of another world outside it; a maddening, ecstatic prism of life itself. Here, Trier has found a landscape that complements his sensuous and humanist sensibilities, along with his penchant for restrained and assured melodrama. The film reaches through the screen to connect the trenchant issues of modernity as it relates to art with the human being’s withering ability to see the truth of his or herself as both an individual and as a cell of a greater body. These are treacherous paths to tread – but where other directors would resort to the didactic, Trier instead opts to excavate the complexity and irreducibility of the dynamics inherent to his chosen subjects, whether physical or thematic. Possibility and redemption abound for the sentimental.