★★★★ (4 out of 4)
Delicate business is being transacted in “Sentimental Value,” the new cinema stunner from Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier that sneaks up and floors you in ways so hilarious and heartbreaking that you’ll love it to pieces. I know I did. If Trier and all four of his principal players, each distinctively wonderful, don’t go home with Oscar nominations, along with one for Best Picture, please join me in picketing the Academy.
What’s it about? Family—the kind you make and break in life and art, in this case film and theater, with no adjacent trauma left unexamined in the script by Trier and Eskil Vogt. Stellan Skarsgård had barely recovered from a stroke when he took on the part of Gustav Borg, a celebrated film director who hasn’t worked in 15 years or seen much of his two daughters, actress Nora (Renata Reinsve) and wife and mother Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas).
Let me start by saying that Gustav is the crowning achievement of Skarsgård’s long and distinguished career (remember 1996’s “Breaking the Waves”—my God). He nails every ounce of charm and manipulation in Gustav, as well as his secret heart, and now this prodigal father is back in Norway with an agenda.
The surface one is to attend the funeral of his former wife, an Oslo therapist with direct experience of his talent and malignant narcissism. The more furtive one is a script he wants to slip Nora, the actress daughter who’s bankable on stage and series TV and a definite asset for financing his planned film to be shot in the Borg home, the repository of so many memories.
The problem is Nora can’t stand her daddy, whose abandonment has left her with thorny issues, including a fear of emotional commitment and crippling stage fright. Trier gives us a comic glimpse of Nora doing everything she can think of —food, sex, raw panic—to avoid making her entrance in “The Seagull.” It’s a glorious scene for Reinsve, the star of Trier’s terrific “The Worst Person in the World,” whose acting command, from giggles to gravitas, is simply astonishing
The acting could not be better in this new film landmark spiked with laughs that can suddenly—or maybe not for hours or even days later—leave you choking with tears.
The quiet but no less devastating performance is given by Lilleaas as Agnes, the sister who played Gustav’s mother as a child in an early film and then quit acting (a major sin for Gustav) to marry and raise an adorable young son, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven).
Agnes knows that the film was the only time she ever had her father’s undivided attention, so when he offers Erik a part in the new one, she refuses to allow her son to repeat her painful experience. It’s Agnes who absorbs betrayals, initiates change and creates the balance necessary for the warring factions around her to achieve a hard-won harmony. And it’s Lilleaas who plays her with an enveloping commitment that takes your breath away.
For Gustav, the only thing real is what’s captured on film. That’s his gift and his tragedy. In lesser hands, “Sentimental Value” could descend into hokey melodrama. But the artful subtlety Trier invests in every frame with actors who could not be better creates something else: a new film landmark spiked with laughs that can suddenly—or maybe not for hours or even days later—leave you choking with tears.
Individual scenes—Gustav on a beach with Rachel enjoying a rare moment of unfiltered delight or Nora and Agnes holding onto each other for dear life as if they were still innocent children—ultimately form a tapestry of family members speaking of what might have been and what can’t be now, no matter how much they wish it.
Riding on the camera poetry of Kasper Tuxen and a score to match by Hania Rani and actors speaking in Norwegian and English, Trier offers no phony uplift. But he does know how to take a sad song and make it better. In these troubled times, that’s an exhilarating gift.