With Sentimental valuepresented this year in official competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, Joachim Trier returns where he won, film after film, as one of the most sensitive and subtle European filmmakers of his generation. True to the Croisette, the Norwegian director had upset the public in 2021 with Julie (in 12 chapters) (The Worst Person in the World), which had earned its main actress, Renate Reinsve, the female interpretation prize. It was a revelation: the hatching of an artistic tandem which extends and asserts itself today forcefully in this new film, third collaboration after Oslo, August 31,, Julieand now Sentimental value.
Joachim Trier signs here a finesse work, a family chronicle that explores the invisible strata of resentment, inheritance and transmission. True to his way, he mixes intimate and universal with a rare delicacy. He films families like others film wars: with modesty, but without ever watering the deaf violence of wounds.
The story opens in Oslo, in a house with a little outdated charm, very beautiful, but marked from its construction by a minimal and yet founder defect: a crack in the foundations, which crosses the walls of a whole side of the building. This architectural detail, barely reported, immediately becomes metaphorical. He announces the heart of the film: this house is the scene of the history of the Berg, a united family, but eaten away by the unsaid, the old resentments and the painful absences. Moreover, the film begins with a few scenes retracing the history of this family in this house, as if the space itself retained the memory of past dramas.
On the death of the mother, two sisters are found: Nora, the elder, a hypersensitive actress prey to doubt, and Agnes, more posed, mother of a young boy. Their father, Gustav, a famous but long absent filmmaker, returns to Oslo on this occasion. But it doesn’t just come back for funerals. He also comes to offer his daughter Nora a role in the film he is about to shoot, his first for fifteen years. This gesture, apparently generous, is immediately tackled by ambiguity: Gustav cannot help expressing a barely veiled contempt for the artistic choices of his daughter – in particular his participation in a television series – and betrays, in each of his attitudes, a chronic incapacity to manifest a true paternal love. The film then settles in this tension: a father who returns too late, a girl who has stopped waiting, and a house that has become the receptacle of a congested memory, saturated with what was not said.
Renate Reinsve, here, is simply masterful. From the first sequence, where her theater troop agitates behind the scenes to convince her to go on stage, she imposed a character that is both fragile, anchored, excessive, and an overwhelming truth. She embodies an imbalance woman, never quite in her place, whether in her family, in her career or in the world. She is not trying to seduce: she explores. She gives herself, whole, without detour. Joachim Trier, as always, knows how to film his actors in the nuance, but with her, there is something more: an almost choreographic complicity between staging and interpretation. Renate reinsve modulates each emotion in an infinity of halftone, it carries the film with rare precision and depth, without ever pressing its effects. It becomes difficult to imagine another actress in this role as she seems to live in the interior, with organic sincerity.
Faced with her, Stellan Skarsgård is perfect in the role of the ambiguous patriarch, both distant and domineering, sometimes touching in her awkwardness, often unbearable in her sufficiency. His character is that of a man who has never been able to be a father, but who continues to want to be a director, as if this status could excuse everything. He also managed to convince a Hollywood actress, embodied by her Fanning, to play in her film. A meeting in Deauville, a reciprocal admiration, and the magic seems to operate. But when the rehearsals start, in the family home, and the actress attacks the role of the missing mother, something resists. Real pain infiltrates fiction. The past refuses to be tamed by the staging.
And little by little, the truth is revealed: so that this film can exist, Nora will have to play it. She alone can face this memory, this role, this father. She alone can do justice to what this house, this mourning, conceals with undearage injuries.
With Sentimental valueJoachim Trier delivers a deeply melancholic film, but crossed with discreet humor. We find there his favorite themes-the family, the mourning, the creation, the father-daughter link-approached with an even more refined narrative refinement than in his previous works. He even allows himself a few touches of absurd comedy, in certain scenes, without ever breaking the emotional balance of the story.
The film takes on its full dimension in its last part, when Gustav, finally, films. A shooting, a camera that lights up, a scene that is replayed in the light of the present. This is where sorting, without using any pathos, manages to move deeply. Cinema becomes reparation, or at least attempted repair. It is not a question of rewriting the past, but of doing something about it. To extract, perhaps, a sentimental value.
Future Palme d’Or? Or the best female interpretation price?
Neïla Driss
