#35: Sentimental Value

Joachim Trier's new film feels unpromising and bland on first brush, but becomes oddly compelling as its surprisingly innovative structure is revealed

Confession: I usually develop a judgment about a film within the first 20 minutes of it and spend the rest of the duration of the movie wiffle-waffling back and forth about that judgment. To me, keeping an open mind is an active effort that must be sustained across the running time of the movie, and I put in this effort in pursuit of a potentially romantic notion of objectivity. But truthfully, the judgment I develop to begin with generally sticks. After all, it’s only human to find oneself innocent of bias.

So about 20 minutes into Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, I was pretty certain of writing it off as a piece of middlebrow quality, part of a “tradition of quality,” if you will. Though the opening montage was impressively edited, with a lot of verve and pace put into its snappy fragments – I often thought while watching that Trier would make for a highly in-demand commercial director – once the narrative settled in, the overly familiar contours of the mid-budget European family drama flashed a warning sign for boredom. I buckled down and put on my “objectivity” mode, trying to manage my resistance to the film, but for at least an hour, my efforts seemed to be in vain. The film was not making inroads with me. And yet, something rather unusual happened when the credits rolled: I found myself thinking that this was a pretty good movie.

The film follows Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve), a modestly successful theatre actress who in the first act of the film rejects an offer from her director father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) to play the lead role in his latest film. Gustav walked out on his family early in Nora’s childhood, which the film implies has caused her considerable trauma – though not underlined in an emphatic or expository manner, we get the gist that Nora’s tendency to suffer panic attacks and her suicide attempt (brought up in pieces over the course of the film) may have been the result of the mental distress wrought upon her by a difficult childhood. Thus the stage is set for a father-daughter bonding/forgiveness drama in a vein somewhat reminiscent of Toni Erdmann, with all of the unexpected yet somehow unsurprising developments that this genre tends to engender.

You’ve seen all of these scenes before. The mother is dead – the funeral occasions Gustav’s re-entry into the family’s affairs. The beautiful, historic family home lands in Gustav’s hands due to a legal mishap. There’s a sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, very good) who plays good cop to Nora’s bad cop in dealing with the father. And an overarching theme of loneliness hovers over the film, determining its low-key, not-too-downbeat mood. If the film ultimately turned out to be the sort of sleepy, incident-driven slice-of-life piece that it threatens to be for a good chunk of its duration, it would not have left much of an impression on me. Yet in the final act of the movie, Trier plays a few structural cards that I wasn’t aware were even in his deck, and the result is that I had to rethink the movie not as a realist drama but as a conceptual work that operates on abstract terms on a fundamental level despite concealing its intentions under a naturalistic surface texture.

In a way, I see Trier as a lightly likable director of prestige projects not too dissimilar from, say, Michael Curtiz. His choices in terms of cinematography, découpage, and direction of acting are largely lukewarm, high-percentage plays that neither dazzle nor fizzle. On directing alone, I don’t think I took to the film very much. But the screenwriting (co-credited to Eskil Vogt) turned out to be much more canny and considered than I was anticipating. (Perhaps credit should also be given to editor Olivier Bugge Coutté, as the film shows considerable signs of post-production assembly.)

The key factor here is the odd little subplot of Gustav casting the American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning, perfectly cast) to take over the role in his new movie after Nora rejects it. Originally, I had taken this part of the movie as a dramatic convenience to help the filmmakers contrive drama and conflict between Gustav and Nora. But by some sleight of hand, the filmmakers developed the warm working relationship between Gustav and Rachel into an analogue of what a healthy father-daughter relationship might look like, and left most of the expected bickering and recriminations between Nora and Gustav off-screen. Without knowing how the film ends, it’s very hard to anticipate the purpose of the filmmakers in creating this parallel, as it could just be taken as a way to characterize Gustav.

So I was struck with a sense of surprise when the film veered away from Rachel in the 3rd act and grafted the emotions explored in the rehearsal process onto the father-daughter thread, transferring the warmth of that relationship onto the troubled one between Nora and Gustav with remarkable ease. This felt like an innovative way to get around the difficulty of making this sort of reconciliation narrative convincing: by outsourcing the process to the subnarrative, which is framed as an exploration of a fictional work, the filmmakers save themselves from the task of making the reunion work on a purely psychological level. Instead, the audience is made to connect the dots between the film-within-a-film and the film proper, so that the mere fact that Nora ends up taking the role in the end is enough to resolve the film’s central conflict, skipping past the usual formality of a tearful confrontation and airing out of dirty laundry and going directly to the the postmodern final scene “button” that wraps up the relationship drama in one swift motion.

Even the sister character, Agnes, whom I at first took to be a bit of background detail, ends up contributing to the complexity of the film by acting as a foil to Nora – the fact that she seems relatively well-adjusted while Nora is burdened by mental health issues enhances the ambiguity of the degree of Gustav’s abandonment of the two. And she even plays a key part in bringing the structural machinations to completion by bringing Gustav’s script to Nora after reading it, delivering along with it a revelatory interpretation that the script – which we’ve mostly heard described as being based on Gustav’s mother, who committed suicide – is really about Nora. (I do enjoy the fact that the fact that Gustav’s script is good is such a critical plot point, somewhat unusual for this kind of film.) All of a sudden, the film feels richly layered with all sorts of possible interpretations about art and life and relationships; without going into my own personal interpretation of the ending, I appreciated the contemplative place that we landed in, which seemed so far from the goal when the film started out.

This is my first Joachim Trier film, having skipped his previous films based on prejudice against the trailers, which all looked like milquetoast dramas to me. And maybe he generally makes milquetoast dramas – most elements of his directing style seem tailored to making good-looking, well-acted, unambitious dramas, nothing that would rock the boat. But maybe the screenwriter Trier is not the director Trier: underneath the polished exterior, Sentimental Value makes a bid for structural innovation that succeeded against all odds, and I’d be coloured curious to see it again knowing the full view of its narrative plan.