Halfhearted 'Sentimental Value' doesn't earn it
NEON
Perhaps “Sentimental Value” is an exercise to see how susceptible viewers are to the suggestion of feelings without the actual exploration of them. After all, director/co-writer Joachim Trier’s last movie, the wildly overrated “The Worst Person in the World,” never got close to its central relationships and people swooned anyway. Trier’s latest, which shifts the focus to family dynamics but remains at a distance, is both less troubling and more forgettable.
The setup seems juicy, I guess, like an intimate soap opera or behind-the-scenes assessment of art’s interaction with and use by the real people who make it. Years after her pretentious filmmaker father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard) abandoned her family, Nora (“TWPITW” star Renate Reinsve) remains, understandably, less than eager to pretend that all’s well. So when dad offers the theater actress a part in his long-awaited next movie (to play her grandmother who killed herself!), Nora’s a hard pass, leaving the door open for big star Rachel (Elle Fanning) to work with a director it seems she’s admired for about 20 minutes.
Maybe this movie allows a lot of audience superimposing, to take the framing of history and open-ended wounds and act as if “Sentimental Value” both accesses and delivers with poignancy and wisdom. Yet as this estranged family (including Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Nora’s younger sister Anges) searches for what they’re trying to resolve, neither they nor Trier ever actually find it, leaving average performances without grounding. There is only the vague sense of time passing as if that’s enough, and it isn’t, not for a story that gives the impression of substance without providing any. It’s the outline of a family drama and notions of pain and distance and intimacy without texture, just like the introductory piece about the old family house as a character that gets left behind. It’s not about art standing in as a replacement for real connection or how it’s used to process hurt; that would suggest narrative developments and thematic depth that just haven’t been conceived.
Bad dad, unhappy childhood, you get the point. That isn’t to nullify trauma but to acknowledge the degree to which “Sentimental Value” is a dead end of ideas, especially in how we see Rachel struggle to understand her character while her director gives her little chance to do so. And having characters praise Gustav’s script is a cheap, unconvincing attempt to reverse what we see of his work, which isn’t any more impressive than the movie about him.
A family and its regrets and missed communications and lingering unease can offer so much; continually, annoyingly cutting to black, Trier fashions only a template, at times like an international version of “Here,” and is wrong to believe he’s gone anywhere.
C
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