Co-writer/director Joachim Trier has gone where few artists would dare: the relationship between two daughters and a strong-willed father. He has accomplished this favorably in Sentimental Value, a Swedish drama so delicately told that the imperious film-director father becomes almost heroic if only just loving and, while still absent and ambitious, gradually moving back into their lives.
Sweden’s preeminent actor, Stellan Skarsgard,
plays Gustav Borg as a previously renowned director, not lately so much. As a successful actress, Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) turns down his offer to star in a picture he wrote about her and him while other daughter Agnes Borg Pettersen (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) leads a more family-centered life with children after a promising career.
As always with high-performing stars, underlying motivations direct their decisions, dad possibly getting back to family and creating a successful film and Nora getting back at dad for abandoning them to have a career. This multi-level emotional transit, not unusual for any family, is a way for the audience to identify with the vagaries of family life.
Besides the common challenges, Sentimental Value offers the best acting of the year powerful in its underplaying. Each character carves a unique personality that is better for the father’s remoteness as the two daughters navigate between breaking from his gravity and yet needing to bond with him emotionally.
As a father of 5 daughters and film critic, I can confidently claim Joachim Trier one of the finest younger filmmakers of our times. He has made endearing the eternal struggle between fathers and daughters for love and understanding, and he has brought an inside look at the creative process of transporting script to screen.
While Sentimental Value may not depict the sweet bond in To Kill a Mockingbird or the amusing eccentricity in Little Miss Sunshine, it does have the gravitational pull of Interstellar and Aftersun. In other words, if you want a film that will entertain and enlighten as well as win the international Oscar, see it now in your local theater.I should know.
Sentimental Value
Director: Joachim Trier (Reprise)
Screenplay: Trier, Eskil Vogt (The Worst Person in the World)
Cast: Renate Reinsve (A Different Man), Stellan Skarsgard (Amistad)
Rating: R
Length: 2h 13m
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio.Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com