Oslo. Nora, a stage actress, freezes and has stage freight during the premiere, but is still able to go on stage and perform. She has an affair with Jakob. Her sister Agnes is an historian, single mother of Erik. When their mother dies, Nora and Agnes are reluctant to renew their contact with their absent father Gustav, a film director who left them when they were kids and lived in Sweden. Gustav plans his final film with Nora in the lead, but she refuses. The script is based on Gustav's mother, who committed suicide when he was a kid. American actress Rachel approaches Gustav and wants to star in the film, they rehearse, but both conclude she is wrong for the role. When Agnes forces Nora to read the script, Nora is moved, and once herself tried to commit suicide. Nora accepts the role and Gustav directs the film with her.
In this unusual parent-children drama, the writer and director Joachim Trier uses filmmaking as a therapy for reconciliation, since both of the protagonists, Nora and Gustav, are artists: she is an actress, he a director, and they need to work together in a film, in cordial manner, to undo their dysfunction. Three excellent sequences: in the opening act, the narrator says that Nora, while a kid in school, was assigned to write an essay as if she was an object, and she chose to write about her house, which has some wonderful observations ("She described how its belly shook as she and her sister ran downstairs... She wondered if the floors liked to be trampled on. If the walls were ticklish"). The second one is when Nora has a nervous breakdown behind the scenes, before the premiere of her play, but is still able to perform on stage. The third one is a surreal scene that reminds of Bergman's "Persona", some 98 minutes into the film, where Gustav is standing still and looking into the camera, but as the light and shadows around his head keep moving around, this invisibly "dissolves" into shadows moving over faces of Nora and her sister Agnes, also looking into the camera, implying that their three lifepaths are interconnected. The rest is a bit weaker, never reaching this high level.
"Sentimental Value" once again shows that Trier is not able to write a focused script to the fullest. He brings up several plot points, but is not able to develop them naturally into a climatic moment, and some subplots drift away. Nora, for instance, is angry at her absent father Gustav. Why not develop this into a clear conflict in the finale? In another subplot, Nora has an affair with her colleague Jakob, but where exactly is this going? What role does it play in the story? Not much. The same goes for American actress Rachel who wants to play the lead in Gustav's film, but then they both conclude she is not the right choice. Why is Rachel necessary for the story? Both Jakob and Rachel could have been cut without the storyline losing anything. Trier is not so much preoccupied with plot as much as creating a 'slice-of-life' character interactions. The actors are all amazing, especially Renate Reinsve as Nora and Stellan Skarsgard as Gustav—in one of their best interactions, Gustav tells Nora why he didn't follow much of her acting career, because he doesn't like theatre: "I can tell if an actor is any good in two minutes". However, Gustav writing a role for Nora is his way of communication, and it mirrors Nora's personal secret. "Sentimental Value" is very good, and yet, it is peculiar that Trier is never able to be anything more than "sufficiently satisfying". He is never "outstandingly satisfying" as, let's say, Vinterberg was in "Festen" or Brooks was in "Terms of Endearment". He takes several shortcuts and misses some unused potentials. One example: 25 minutes into "Sentimental Value", a clip is shown from Gustav's fictional film, an ending in one take where a boy and a girl run across a panorama, a meadow, while two Nazis are chasing them, and the girl enters the train, sits and looks through the window, at the boy being caught, as he stays behind. The girl is played by Gustav's daughter Agnes. Bergman or Vinterberg would have surely not missed the opportunity for an ending that is similar, with the now grown-up Agnes also entering a train and leaving Gustav, which would rhyme with her life, in a metafilm codification. But Trier did not go there. Which already says something.
Grade:+++
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