{"id":363554,"date":"2025-12-22T01:23:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T01:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/363554\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T01:23:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T01:23:09","slug":"sentimental-value-ending-explained-by-joachim-trier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/363554\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Sentimental Value’ Ending Explained By Joachim Trier"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joachim Trier<\/a> isn\u2019t 100 percent comfortable with the fact that his Oscar contender, \u201cSentimental Value<\/a>,\u201d is being labeled a melodrama. But then again, he was never comfortable with the idea of ever making a film<\/a> that could be interpreted as one. On the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast<\/a>, the self-described \u201ccounterculture punk\u201d said his decision to tackle the emotional family story was his most difficult.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m out on a limb with this one,\u201d said Trier. \u200a\u201cI\u2019ve done this the best I can, [to] go to very gentle, tender places of love and connection and disconnection, to try to get in the intimacy of these relationships for real, and I\u2019ve been really anxious throughout the whole process, asking \u2019Is it too much?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"(Clockwise<\/a> \"Scott<\/a> <\/p>\n

The celebrated Norwegian filmmaker\u2019s sixth film digs into an area most people reserve for therapy: The unspoken space in parent-child relationships, and those wounds that don\u2019t get discussed, but that get handed down and carried by the next generation. The idea that the unreconciled trauma of the father, celebrated film director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd<\/a>), is something carried by his estranged daughters, in particular the actress Nora (Renate Reinsve<\/a>), presented Trier with a screenwriting challenge.<\/p>\n

His previous films had tackled multi-character narratives that switched between perspectives, but \u201cSentimental Value<\/a>\u201d would be what Trier described as his first \u201cpolyphonic story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis [multi-character narrative] more than anything I\u2019ve done, I\u2019m trying to create this one emotional arc in the story,\u201d said Trier. \u201cIt\u2019s a super complicated balancing act, and thematically, we realized that we had a film when we had the ending.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ending of \u201cSentimental Value\u201d is a moment of true movie magic, an extended silent scene, in which the source of that trauma is not discussed, but we share in the emotional undercurrent of a profound moment of understanding between father and daughter. While on the podcast, Trier dug into the ending, the narrative structure of how he built toward that moment, and the power of the human face on the big screen.<\/p>\n

Gustav\u2019s Movie \u2018Homesick\u2019<\/p>\n

In \u201cSentimental Value\u201d we see the one word Swedish title of Gustav\u2019s screenplay, which Trier said translates to \u201clonging for home;\u201d homesick being the less poetic one-word translation in English.<\/p>\n

Trier said he introduced Gustav to the audience through Nora\u2019s point of view, as a \u201cfailed father\u201d coming back to the home he abandoned for their mother\u2019s funeral. Nora sees Gustav\u2019s attempt to make his first film in 15 years, with her starring, as being the product of the same narcissistic self-interest that made him a bad father. What she doesn\u2019t see is that Gustav\u2019s \u201clonging for home\u201d is his attempt to get at the wounds associated with growing up in the same house<\/a> Nora did, where his mother was tortured and captured during the war, and eventually committed suicide.<\/p>\n

According to Trier, what Nora doesn\u2019t come to realize until the end is the making the film is actually Gustav \u201chumbling\u201d himself as a parent.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I was interested in turning it around and realizing that this film he\u2019s made is a love letter,\u201d said Trier. \u201cBecause he doesn\u2019t have a language for it in his social life to say [to his] daughter, \u2018That I see you and I think you carry the same loneliness that I do.\u200a And it\u2019s a mystery to me. Let\u2019s explore this together and make a movie, because it\u2019s the best I can do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The reason the discovery of the ending was such a critical breakthrough for Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt was it showed they could merge \u201cthe theme of the fictional and the real in creative people\u2019s lives.\u201d Explained Trier, \u201cWe realized that we could tie Gustav\u2019s expression of a deep unspoken loneliness into his pondering upon his mother\u2019s suicide and his worry of not being able to communicate with his daughter \u2014 and the daughter\u2019s experience of strangely carrying the weight of three generations \u2014 in an unspoken, wounded way, all into that film that he\u2019s making.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ozu and the Younger Sister Role<\/p>\n

\"SENTIMENTALInga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Agnes in \u201cSentimental Value\u201dCourtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say Gustav has this stated goal when he sets out to make the film, said Trier, \u201cAs an artist, I imagine Gustav, the purpose of creating something isn\u2019t always obvious.\u201d The story of two artists, who both avoid their trauma and its connection to their art, presented another screenwriting challenge: How to structure a film that organically leads to the breakthrough on the movie set.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo structurally, how do we set all that up? How do we balance the different point of views? How do we draw a cinematic picture of that unspoken space between them?,\u201d said Trier. \u201cBecause these are people that are quite articulate and they can talk, but they\u2019re also avoiding as hell about the essential thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trier would find the answer by studying other filmmakers whose films delved into similar unspoken aspects of family dynamics. In particular, it was the archetype of the younger sister or daughter character in Yasujir\u014d Ozu\u2019s films that led him to the character of Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) as the solution. Explained Trier, \u201cThat the younger sister, the gaze \u2014 and staying with the look of silence at the table\u2013 of the one that\u2019s listening and observing and for the audience to slowly realize that she sees more than the others, but how will she convey that, that sense of love?\u201d<\/p>\n

Agnes is the inverse of her sister and father, the one who chose not to pursue a career as an artist (despite starring in one of her father\u2019s most celebrated films as a child) and instead have a family of her own. And It\u2019s from this perspective that she is able to see what haunts them both. The quiet character\u2019s loving struggle to help them connect the dots is the narrative engine Trier would need.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m trying to make more of a polyphonic story and to hopefully surprise the audience a bit,\u201d said Trier. \u201cAnd the heart of the story really being carried by the loving younger sister, Inga Lilleaas, where at the beginning, she\u2019s more an observer, but then actually she\u2019s a very important piece in how to resolve at least the baby steps of reconciliation that we\u2019re offering here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Silence and the Face<\/p>\n

While discussing the ending on the podcast, Trier talked about how throughout his career he\u2019s tried to build toward these extended silent moments, especially at the end of his films. His second feature, \u201cOslo, August 31st\u201d took this to extremes, ending with nearly 30 minutes of no dialogue. Said Trier. \u201cWe build towards it so that I hope the audience has a sense of enough [of what\u2019s] at play for interpretation, to really give depth to silence.\u201d The reason Trier is drawn to these types of big silent moments is that they rely on what he believes is the filmmaker\u2019s greatest tool.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can talk about mood and light and space, but ultimately, the human face is what I get the biggest kick out of. I love closeups and I cast for closeups,\u201d said Trier. \u201cI really care that the actors can do that thing that we can only do in the movies, which is be aggressively intimate with them, and look at them in a way that we can\u2019t in real life. That\u2019s why I go to the movies. You\u2019re allowed to stare at each other in a perversely intense way that no one sane human being would do with another human being, and really get to know someone\u2019s face and to read them and empathize with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the most impressive aspects of the \u201cSentimental Value\u201d script is that it lays the foundation for the depth of complex emotions Reinsve and Skarsg\u00e5rd explore and convey with just their faces.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor them to look at each other after that, knowing that they don\u2019t know how to talk at all, but that something that the audience is allowed to interpret themselves \u2013\u00a0something must have moved forward, something must have happened in that reciprocal long process of gazes at the end,\u201d said Trier.<\/p>\n

While editing \u201cSentimental Value,\u201d Trier received the note from several people that he shorten the ending and cut way back on Reinsve and Skarsg\u00e5rd silent looks. It was something he determined he couldn\u2019t do. There was too much there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joachim Trier isn\u2019t 100 percent comfortable with the fact that his Oscar contender, \u201cSentimental Value,\u201d is being labeled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363555,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,1689,37998,86036,344,86037,86038,197794],"class_list":{"0":"post-363554","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-filmmaker-toolkit-podcast","13":"tag-joachim-trier","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-renate-reinsve","16":"tag-sentimental-value","17":"tag-stellan-skaarsgard"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363554","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=363554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}