Stellan Skarsgard, left, and Elle Fanning in a scene from Sentimental Value.Kasper Tuxen/The Associated Press
Sentimental Value
Directed by Joachim Trier
Written by Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt
Starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning
Classification PG; 133 minutes
Opens in theatres Nov. 14
There are homes built to be in the movies (the Hollywood Hills’ Chemosphere in Body Double, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House from The Day of the Locust and Blade Runner), and then there are movies built to showcase homes – a reverse-engineered kind of cinema that lets the brick and mortar do most of the heavy narrative and thematic lifting.
Director Joachim Trier’s impressively and shamelessly crafted new drama Sentimental Value is erected firmly in the latter camp, largely set inside an Oslo home whose worn but comforting elegance suggests a fairy-tale cottage that might have once been occupied by especially noble Vikings, but plunked straight into a modern Norway neighbourhood.
The property – equipped with enough windows to ensure a reliable stream of natural light, a.k.a. the dream home of the world’s fussiest cinematographer – even boasts a defining element too perfectly metaphorical: a crack in its foundation, the fissure crawling up one side of the wall like a varicose vein.
The crack has been there for generations, we’re told, but don’t worry: The home is too sturdy to crumble. That’s as good and tidy a summation of Sentimental Value’s intentions as possible, with Trier delivering the latest in a long line of elegantly shot films (2015’s Louder than Bombs, 2021’s The Worst Person in the World) that presume to flatter and nourish audiences but instead end up dulling and starving them with their eager-to-please obviousness. You can see the property values depreciating from a mile away.
Sentimental Value examines what’s required for actors to play actors
Real estate isn’t the prime concern of the family who have inhabited the film’s marquee property for close to a century, but it’s certainly a preoccupation. The home’s most recent occupant, the elderly mother of two sisters – one a revered actress in her prime named Nora (Renate Reinsve), the other a former child-star named Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) who has now settled into anonymous domesticity – has just died, and the children assume that the estate will be passed onto them for a tidy resale profit.
But then their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard) swoops in, the world-renowned filmmaker deciding that he would in fact like to move into the house – which was his own childhood home – and perhaps even make a new semi-autobiographical movie inside of it. To further strain the “sentimental” part of the film’s equation, Gustav wants Nora to play a facsimile of his own mother, who killed herself inside the place decades ago.
Renate Reinsve, left, plays a revered actress in her prime and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays the role of a former child-star.Kasper Tuxen/The Associated Press
That Gustav’s film isn’t titled something like If These Walls Could Talk is about the only restraint that Trier displays, the director otherwise proceeding to ram through all the heart-tugging motions, every conflict resolved with a too-finely calculated burst of polished Scandinavian catharsis. It is tidy, it is easy and it is, by the end, far too flinty.
Still, even though Trier knows exactly which emotional buttons are available to him doesn’t preclude him from pushing a few of the right ones now and then.
After Nora quickly turns Gustav’s acting role down, the director – who hasn’t made a movie in far too long, yet is revered in all the right film-festival circles (wishful thinking for Trier’s later years, perhaps) – finds a substitute star in an American actress in the Elle Fanning mode. She is played, of course, by Elle Fanning. Seeking something more ambitious and vaguely European than the Hollywood pap that she is constantly offered (congratulations to whichever multiplexes program this film side by side with Predator: Badlands), Fanning’s ingenue Rachel Kemp becomes both an ally and victim of Gustav.
At first, their relationship is just intriguing enough to buoy the entire exercise. And every member of the cast – including Reinsve, now a three-time Trier collaborator, and Skarsgard, who headlines the film with such profoundly amusing cocksure confidence that it is a total farce the film’s producers are campaigning him as a “supporting” actor in the Oscar race instead of a lead – is fully locked in, committed for the long emotional haul.
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, left, and Elle Fanning in a scene from Sentimental Value.Kasper Tuxen/The Associated Press
Yet once Rachel meets Nora and the substitute daughter angle is highlighted in bright, blinding yellow, the Gustav/Rachel/Nora dynamic wears thinner and thinner – even if the whole Rachel element allows for a solid Netflix joke aimed directly at the more high-brow Criterion Channel and MUBI subscribers in the crowd.
It should be no spoiler to note that the final few moments of Sentimental Value bring the audience back inside the marquee Oslo house. But when Trier pulls the curtain back just a bit on his big, giant metaphorical manse, he inadvertently gives his entire game away. There really is no place like home.