“Sentimental Value”, the multi-Academy Award-nominated film from Joachim Trier (“The Worst Person In The World”), begins and ends with a house; a much-loved space where a family was fostered, shattered, and remade from the spare parts. The family is the Borgs: husband, wife, and two daughters. The husband Gustav (Academy Award-nominated Stellan Skarsgård) is a filmmaker, quite a revered one at that, who feels stifled by the mundanity of family life. A narrator informs us that the eldest daughter, Nora, once wrote an essay describing their home as if it were alive, opining how its belly would rumble as the sisters ran down the stairs, how it might watch them head off to school, and perhaps feel melancholy when left devoid of the inherent chaos of life. She wondered if “the floors liked being trod on. If its walls were ticklish. If it ever felt pain.” In their perfect home, there was a single flaw, a fault line which over the course of generations had begun to crackle its way through the foundation and into the family rooms, leaving a ragged scar running the length of the house; a blight upon what was otherwise a sanctuary, except for when the parents fought. Regularly, both sisters would huddle in a far room, listening to the hooked barbs and fury being leveled at the two most important people in the world to them. “The noise” was awful, yet even when Gustav ultimately abandoned his family, “the house missed the other sounds he made”. That sticky sentiment, that rough gunk that wedges itself against the baseboards of a well-loved home, where anger and love pour out as if from burst pipes, is something innately human yet almost impossible to portray accurately without falling into treacly hyperbole or melodrama. Life isn’t a movie, so when a movie dares to pinpoint feelings often left long abandoned in the back reaches of childhood, the ones that come rushing back at us at the most inopportune time, like roaches through cracks in the floorboards, it’s worth paying attention.
The bulk of “Sentimental Value” follows the adult Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) in the aftermath of their mother’s death. Nora has become a theater actress, though she suffers from debilitating panic attacks that very nearly ruined the first preview of her new play. At the memorial after the funeral, both sisters are shocked to see Gustav come by to pay his respects; a rare sighting from their somewhat estranged father. They seem to have an understanding, the kind where polite smiles and hugs defend against decades of resentment that need to be said but are stifled. Yet Gustav seems amiable to a fault. He asks Nora if she will join him for a coffee, saying they need to talk. What he presents her with is not an apology for leaving their mother, or any kind of reconciliatory gesture at all. Instead, he offers her a screenplay, allegedly his best yet, and asks if Nora would play the lead role. He intends to film the movie in their old home with a story that shares hints of truth with that of his own mother, who hung herself in the house when he was a boy. Nora refuses even to read the script, believing he is once again prioritizing his art over family, thus seemingly condemning Gustav’s masterwork to never being made. As chance would have it, at a French retrospective of his films, Gustav is summoned by Rachel Kemp (Academy Award-nominated Elle Fanning), a genuine movie star who loves his work and is eager to make something with him. So, now with Netflix funding and a bona fide star in tow, Gustav returns home to his confused daughters to begin teaching Rachel Kemp how to, essentially, play his daughter Nora.
Gustav seems to innately understand that the only way for him to find his way back to his family, to allow them to understand the depth of his love for them, is to include them in the thing he, arguably, loves the most. This is in no way heroic, virtuous, or even kind. There is a selfish insistence that the women who were the girls that he abandoned need to know him, that they need to communicate, if only through the words he wrote, which abstractly relate to them. As the title suggests, it is a nugget of sentiment that both draws him back to them and keeps them from kicking him to the curb. Why do we do this? As the film accurately shows, a home and a family are cavernous; filled with creaky hidden alcoves where secrets are long buried, perhaps for good reason. It’s that dirty bit of sand, when buried with enough time and emotional expenditure, that can sometimes emerge as diamond-cut art, profound yet with edges sharp enough to slice bone. Nora, an artist herself, gave up needing her father’s approval years ago; yet to be seen by him, to exist in the god’s eye of his favor, is the drug she may have kicked as a child, but still yearns for. It’s fair for her to be suspicious of his intentions, even when the truth of the film he has written comes to light. She owes him nothing but cannot extricate herself from his gravitational pull, like an inhabited planet orbiting a sun that will one day go supernova and swallow it whole. Some things are just the way they are, and we all, in our own ways, want to be seen by our fathers, for who we are, yes, but also for who they hoped we might be. For Nora, seeing her father find the glitzier version of herself in the kind, yet massively over her head, Rachel Kemp, is a borderline betrayal. It seems as if he might have leveled up to a new daughter, one who loves the man only for his art and yet lacks the memory of those angry noises that once echoed through the empty hallows of their home.
One of the best scenes in the movie features Rachel rehearsing a scene with Gustav, the lead character’s show-stopping monologue, a begrudging prayer to a god she doesn’t even fully believe in. In a fantastic performance by Fanning, Rachel tries her best to reach the emotional vulnerability needed to fulfill Gustav’s vision for the character. That she almost gets there is a relief, as the character is in no way intended to be ditzy or untalented, but that she does not fully nail the intimacy of the writing’s intention renders any half measures irrelevant. We watch Gustav as she performs his words, impassive in his expression. It’s clear that he is searching for something that she cannot give him, but how much is he willing to sacrifice to ensure the movie gets made? Will he settle for something commercial when it was meant to be personal? The film he is making, not unlike Nora’s essay about their home, is doing what it can to paper over the shattered drywall littering the hallways of their lives; not to hide it but instead to move past, grow beyond, maybe even find something better built from the wreckage. Perhaps it is too little too late, yet what is art if not a means by which we can understand each other, a cipher made for those willing to engage further. “Sentimental Value” isn’t so much about a home as it is how love can manifest in the crud between your toes, the dust bunnies that roll along the floor, and the weird water stains left from tenants who lived whole lives in the place you now inhabit. It is the cracks in the foundation that make something special, whether a home, a family, or even a film. Time passes us by, but art lives forever, and by extension, the lives rendered immortal by the stories we tell.
“Sentimental Value” is a lovely film, warm and complicated without becoming hyperbolic, a truthful expression of family and the way we find our own languages to communicate. Sentiment at its most valuable is simply a reminder that there is more to find beyond the event horizon of nostalgia; something which enriches more than it destroys, and that, hopefully, will always help us find a way back home.
Find love in the cracks where you can.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Sentimental Value” is playing at The Broad Theater, Prytania Theatres at Canal Place, and Prytania Theater Uptown.
