Sentimental Value is European cinema at its very best

Depending on who you ask, Norway is either the home of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, A-Ha, or a generous welfare state.

If you ask someone with a Letterboxd account, they will tell you Norway is the home of director Joachim Trier and actress Renate Reinsve.

Relative to their Swedish neighbours to the east and their Danish neighbours to the south, Norway has never quite reached the heights of their Scandinavian peers in the field of cinema.

That all changed in 2021 with the release of The Worst Person In The World (a film, in the interest of full journalistic disclosure, is in this journalist’s personal Letterboxd 4), a film that made international stars of Trier’s brand of bittersweet musings and Reinsve’s expressive face. 

The duo have reunited for Sentimental Value, and remarkably, may have made an even better film this time around.

The Worst Person In The World is unique as it captures something very specific; it is the greatest depiction of how the world feels as a young person, but you don’t quite have your life sorted out.

Released in that strange 2022 space where cinemas were open because of Covid, but not really, the film did help put MUBI on the map as the distributor that puts out smart, biting European films you’re not afraid to tell your friends you cried at.

Sentimental Value, if you can believe it, builds upon what was already great and makes something that approaches transcendent.

Telling the story of an artistic Norwegian family, two sisters (played by Reinsve and the unknown Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are coping with the death of their psychologist mother when their estranged film director father (played by Stellan Skarsgard) comes back into the picture.

As their father comes back into their lives, the sisters wrestle with the burden of generational trauma; this isn’t exactly The Naked Gun.

With early talk that Kerry’s Jessie Buckley is the favourite to take home the Oscar for Best Actress for Hamnet, it will be the Norwegian Reinsve that will serve as her most fierce competition for the trophy.

Reinsve has established herself as one of the best actresses of her generation, and this film only confirms what we already knew: she deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Ingrid Bergman in the context of the all-time greats.

For an actor who was a total unknown to 99.99% of cinema fans this time five years ago, her rise to the best of her generation is remarkable.

Every director has a trademark (Jonathan Demme and his close-ups, Tony Scott and his whip-pans, Michael Haneke making you really uncomfortable), and Trier’s trademark is making audiences sit in the silence and examine the body language of his actors.

Reinsve has a prodigious ability to communicate what she’s thinking without saying anything, and her masterclass in body language is a great contrast to Stellan Skarsgard’s performance.

Skarsgard is an actor you’ve seen in 20 films, but can never quite name him (hint: he’s one of the dads in Mamma Mia), and this film has been marked as his shot at an Oscar.

By every metric, Skarsgard gives the performance of his long and storied career; Skarsgard arrives in the film, and you can nearly feel a chill descend as you recognise him as the one person in your life you’d rather avoid.

Skarsgard’s character is an acclaimed film director, and Reinsve’s character has become an acclaimed theatre actress who struggles with stage fright and nerves.

When father and daughter reunite and attempt to settle their differences, it becomes clear that the years of emotional baggage between them are too much of a barrier to overcome.

A plan for Skarsgard’s director character to cast Reinsve’s theatre actress character goes awry, which further drives a wedge between them; this is where the drama of Sentimental Value lives, on the edges of residual family tension.

Just like how Trier launched Reinsve to international stardom, he has pulled the same trick again with the casting of Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas.

You don’t know her from a hole in the ground, which makes the casting incredibly clever; in the film, she’s a former child actress who decided to settle for a quiet domestic life with her husband and her son, and as the film progresses, it’s revealed she’s the rock of that family unit.

Reinsve and Ibsdotter Lilleaas are uncanny in their sister dynamic; you’d think they actually grew up together.

The final piece of the jigsaw is Elle Fanning, and her character reveals the tightrope the film walks.

Sentimental Value is an exploration of what happens when you place an American with gee-whiz, heart-on-the-sleeve sentimentality with Nordic stoicism and icy interiorism.

Fanning’s character is an American ingénue who is keen to work with Skarsgard’s director character, and the two form what may be considered a parasitic relationship.

Through Fanning’s character, Skarsgard is able to get a foot back in the commercial game and tell a story about his own family life, while Fanning is able to flex her artistic muscles by working with a serious European director.

The meta-casting works well here as Trier explores the clash in temperament and cultural values.

Trier is an emotionally intelligent filmmaker in a way you wouldn’t get with an American director; there is a behavioural, almost observant approach to his directing style that places you right in the heart of the film.

Trier lets the camera glide around the actors and moves the camera from one part of the room to another; it makes the viewer feel like they are a fly on the wall.

In recent weeks, we made fun of Jay Kelly for being a film that has nothing new to say about daddy issues and the relationship between art and commerce, and it’s fitting that it’s a European film that shows Hollywood how to tell an infinitely better version of the same story.

The proposed Netflix acquisition of Warner Brothers has, quite rightfully, caused panic among film fans and creatives alike, with fears that the cinema experience as we know could be under threat.

A studio with over a century of stories and legacy being acquired by a streaming service that is allergic to putting movies in cinemas on principle? A true nightmare for film fans.

Sentimental Value debuted at Cannes in May, and the film has a great joke at Netflix’s expense; the implication being that Skarsgard’s director character is horrified about giving up creative control to a soulless, corporate husk.

Perhaps it is films like Sentimental Value, with 10 different production company logos beforehand and countries such as Turkey, Germany, the UK and the Nordic nations funding it, that remind us why we fight for film as an art form to begin with.