{"id":268535,"date":"2025-11-07T09:53:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T09:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/268535\/"},"modified":"2025-11-07T09:53:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T09:53:12","slug":"sentimental-value-review-stellan-skarsgard-and-elle-fanning-steal-swedish-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/268535\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Sentimental Value’ review: Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd and Elle Fanning steal Swedish drama"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Renate Reinsve<\/a> is the new face of Scandinavia: depression with a smile. Standing 5 feet 10 with open, friendly features, the Norwegian talent has a grin that makes her appear at once like an endearing everywoman and a large, unpredictable child. Reinsve zoomed to international acclaim with her Cannes-winning performance in Joachim Trier\u2019s<\/a> 2021 \u201cThe Worst Person in the World,\u201d<\/a> a dramedy tailor-made to her lanky, likable style of self-loathing. Now, Trier has written his muse another showcase, \u201cSentimental Value,\u201d where Reinsve plays an emotionally avoidant theater actor who bounces along in pretty much the same bittersweet key.<\/p>\n

\u201cSentimental Value\u201d gets misty about a few things \u2014 families, filmmaking, real estate \u2014 all while circling a handsome Oslo house where the Borg clan has lived for four generations. It\u2019s a dream home with red trim on the window frames and pink roses in the yard. Yet, sisters Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) aren\u2019t fighting to keep it, perhaps due to memories of their parents\u2019 hostile divorce or maybe because they don\u2019t want to deal with their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd<\/a>, wonderful), who grew up there himself and still owns the place, even though he\u2019s moved to Sweden.<\/p>\n

Trier opens the film with a symbolically laden camera pan across Oslo that ends on a cemetery. He wants to make sure we understand that while Norway looks idyllic to outsiders jealous that all four Scandinavian countries rank among the globe\u2019s happiest, it can still be as gloomy as during the era of Henrik Ibsen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More impressively, Trier shifts to a fabulous, time-bending historical montage of the house itself over the century-plus it\u2019s belonged to the Borgs. There\u2019s a crack in it that seems to represent the fissures in the family, the flaws in their facade. Over these images, Reinsve\u2019s Nora recites a 6th-grade school essay she wrote about her deep identification with her childhood home. Having grown up to become terrified of intimacy, today she\u2019s more like a detached garage.<\/p>\n

Nora and Agnes were young when their father, a modestly well-regarded art-house filmmaker, decamped to a different country. At a retrospective of his work, Gustav refers to his crew as his \u201cfamily,\u201d which would irritate his kids if they\u2019d bothered to attend. Agnes, a former child actor, might note that she, too, deserves some credit. Played in her youth by the compelling Ida Atlanta Kyllingmark Giertsen, Agnes was fantastic in the final shot of Gustav\u2019s masterpiece and Trier takes a teasingly long time to suggest why she retired from the business decades ago, while her older sister keeps hammering at it.<\/p>\n

Gustav hasn\u2019t made a picture in 15 years. He\u2019s in that liminal state of renown that I\u2019m guessing Trier has encountered many times: a faded director who\u2019s burned through his money and clout, but still keeps a tuxedo just in case he makes it back to Cannes. Like Reinsve\u2019s Nora, Gustav acts younger than his age and is at his most charming in small doses, particularly with strangers. Trier and his longtime co-writer Eskil Vogt<\/a> have made him a tad delusional, someone who wouldn\u2019t instantly recognize his graying reflection in a mirror. Sitting down at a cafe with Nora, Gustav jokes that the waitress thinks that they\u2019re a couple on a date. (She almost certainly doesn\u2019t.)<\/p>\n

But the tension between Gustav and Nora is real, if blurry. He\u2019s invited her to coffee not as father and daughter, but as a has-been angling to cast Nora as the lead of his next film, which he claims he\u2019s written for her. His script climaxes with a nod to the day his own mother, Karin (Vilde S\u00f8yland), died by suicide in their house back when he was just a towheaded boy of 7. Furthering the sickly mojo, Gustav wants to stage his version of the hanging in the very room where it happened.<\/p>\n

His awkward pitch is a terrific scene. Gustav and Nora are stiff with each other, both anxious to prove they don\u2019t need the other\u2019s help. But Trier suggests, somewhat mystically, that Gustav has an insight into his daughter\u2019s gloom that making the movie will help them understand. Both would rather express themselves through art than confess how they feel. <\/p>\n

When Gustav offers his daughter career advice, it comes off like an insult. She\u2019s miffed when her dad claims his small indie would be her big break. Doesn\u2019t he know she\u2019d be doing him the favor? She\u2019s the lead of Oslo\u2019s National Theatre<\/a> with enough of a social media following to get the film financed. (With 10 production companies listed in the credits of this very film, Trier himself could probably calculate Nora\u2019s worth to the krone.)<\/p>\n

But Gustav also has a lucky encounter with a dewy Hollywood starlet named Rachel (Elle Fanning<\/a>) who sees him as an old-world bulldog who can give her resume some class. Frustrated by her coterie of assistants glued to their cellphones, Rachel gazes at him with the glowy admiration he can\u2019t get from his own girls. Their dynamic proves to be just as complex as if they were blood-related. If Rachel makes his film, she\u2019ll become a combo platter of his mother, his daughter, his prot\u00e9g\u00e9e and his cash cow. Nora merely merits the financing for a low-budget Euro drama; Rachel can make it a major Netflix production (something \u201cSentimental Value\u201d most adamantly is not).<\/p>\n

It takes money to make a movie. Trier\u2019s itchiness to get into that unsentimental fact isn\u2019t fully scratched. He seems very aware that the audience for his kind of niche hit wants to sniffle at delicate emotions. When Gustav\u2019s longtime producer Michael (Jesper Christensen<\/a>) advises him to keep making films \u201chis way\u201d \u2014 as in antiquated \u2014 or when Gustav takes a swipe at Nora\u2019s career as \u201cold plays for old people,\u201d the frustration in those lines, those doubts whether to stay the course or chase modernity, makes you curious if Trier himself is feeling a bit hemmed in. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a crack running through \u201cSentimental Value\u201d too. A third of it wants to be a feisty industry satire, but the rest believes there\u2019s prestige value in tugging on the heartstrings. The title seems to be as much about that as anything.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got no evidence for Trier\u2019s restlessness other than an observation that \u201cSentimental Value\u201d is most vibrant when the dialogue is snide and the visuals are snappy. There\u2019s a stunning image of Gustav, Nora and Agnes\u2019 faces melting together that doesn\u2019t match a single other frame of the movie, but I\u2019m awful glad cinematographer Kasper Tuxen Andersen got it in there. <\/p>\n

The film never quite settles on a theme, shifting from the relationship between Nora and Agnes, Nora and Gustav, and Gustav and Rachel like a gambler spreading their bets, hoping one of those moments will earn a tear. Nora herself gets lost in the shuffle. Is she jealous of her father\u2019s attention to Rachel? Does she care about her married lover who pops up to expose her issues? Does she even like acting?<\/p>\n

Reinsve\u2019s skyrocketing career is Trier\u2019s most successful wager and he gives her enough crying scenes to earn an Oscar nomination. Skarsg\u00e5rd is certainly getting one too<\/a>. But Fanning delivers the best performance in the film. She\u2019s not only hiding depression under a smile, she\u2019s layering Rachel\u2019s megawatt charisma under her eagerness to please, allowing her insecurity at being Gustav\u2019s second pick to poke through in rehearsals where she\u2019s almost \u2014 but not quite \u2014 up to the task.<\/p>\n

Rachel could have been some Hollywood clich\u00e9, but Fanning keeps us rooting for this golden girl who hopes she\u2019ll be taken seriously by playing a Nordic depressive. Eventually, she slaps on a silly Norwegian accent in desperation and wills herself to cry in character. And when she does, Fanning has calibrated her sobs to have a hint of hamminess. It\u2019s a marvelous detail that makes this whole type of movie look a little forced.<\/p>\n

‘Sentimental Value’<\/p>\n

In Norwegian and English, with subtitles<\/p>\n

Rated: R, for some language including a sexual reference, and brief nudity<\/p>\n

Running time: 2 hours, 13 minutes<\/p>\n

Playing: In limited release Friday, Nov. 7<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Renate Reinsve is the new face of Scandinavia: depression with a smile. Standing 5 feet 10 with open,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":268536,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156498,64,63,32899,64435,134,156499,2582,1689,156496,23518,86036,15460,344,97556,86037,86038,156497,155155],"class_list":{"0":"post-268535","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-agnes","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-daughter","12":"tag-elle-fanning","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-estranged-father","15":"tag-family","16":"tag-film","17":"tag-gustav","18":"tag-image","19":"tag-joachim-trier","20":"tag-movie","21":"tag-movies","22":"tag-rachel","23":"tag-renate-reinsve","24":"tag-sentimental-value","25":"tag-sister-nora","26":"tag-stellan-skarsgard"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}