SENTIMENTAL VALUE

THREE AND A HALF STARS A filmmaker returns home to cast his estranged daughter in the lead role. She turns him down, reopening old family wounds.

DRAMA NORWAY Norwegian #SENTIMENTALVALUE Starring Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve

SENTIMENTAL VALUE arrives freighted with expectation; a Cannes-anointed meditation on family, art and inheritance, that, thankfully, proves far easier to love than its sombre packaging suggests. While it clearly wants to be taken as a serious reckoning with emotional legacy and creative responsibility, its most enduring pleasures come from more modest, human places: the awkwardness of reunion, the comedy of bruised egos, and the quiet recognitions that occur when people realise they’ve been circling the same pain for years.

The story centres on two Norwegian sisters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), whose lives are unsettled by the reappearance of their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a celebrated but emotionally evasive filmmaker. Gustav has an olive branch of sorts - a new film drawn directly from family history, one he hopes Nora will star in. Her refusal sets off a chain of emotional recalibrations, further complicated when the role is instead offered to a well-meaning Hollywood actor (Elle Fanning) who is thrust into the middle of a private reckoning she barely understands. Old wound are picked open as the story moves between rehearsals, conversations and long-suppressed grievances.

There’s an unavoidably blunt idea pulsing beneath SENTIMENTAL VALUE, that parents damage their children, often without malice, sometimes without even noticing. Gustav is shaped by early loss and carries that absence forward, mistaking emotional withdrawal for self-preservation. In doing so, he all but abandons his own children, leaving Nora and Agnes to grow up negotiating love as something conditional and unreliable, and Agnes questioning her own son’s emotional position. These film suggests this isn’t villainy nor tragedy so much as it’s just what happens when grief goes untreated and time is mistaken for healing.

Writer/director Joachim Trier uses a controlled and elegant hand to keep melodrama at bay, leaving the performances that give SENTIMENTAL VALUE its warmth. Skarsgård brings a familiar mix of charm and brittle authority to Gustav, while Reinsve and Lilleaas prove adept at conveying interior conflict with minimal fuss. Fanning is at her gently amusing best as the outsider whose sincerity unsettles more than it soothes.

If SENTIMENTAL VALUE occasionally feels less revelatory than it thinks it is, that’s hardly fatal. Trier’s observations about art and emotional inheritance are familiar, but the film’s generosity toward its characters renders it an engaging, often touching experience. You may not come away in awe of its grand thematic ambitions, but you’ll certainly come away fond of its people, and that’s more than enough.

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