“A masterclass of emotion”: Molly Haskell on Sentimental Value

Nora, our woeful heroine (Renate Reinsve), is having a post-coital cuddle with Jakob, her married boyfriend, somewhere towards the middle of Joachim Trier’s richly observed new film. She says cuddling is silly, she wants to stop. Then she says she’s glad he’s married, no pressure on her. Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie) looks exasperated. Then with a glimmer of sly self-awareness, she says, “I’m fucked up.” “How fucked up are you?” he asks. Nora: “In numbers?” He nods. “Eighty per cent,” she replies. 

The percentage is slightly higher in the opening scene, when as leading actress in a company performing Ibsen and Chekhov, Nora has a full-scale meltdown on opening night. The camera follows as she darts up and down backstage corridors, hysterical and unreasonable as the clock ticks and the audience waits. Finally she comes up to Jakob, who’s part of the crew, and delivers an ultimatum. Make love to her or slap her, or she won’t go on. He complies with the latter and she makes her grand entrance. 

Reinsve showed in her earlier film with Trier, The Worst Person in the World (2021), that she could test the audience’s patience and win them back, play romcom and stick pins in it, sometimes simultaneously. I’ve always had a soft spot for actresses playing unsympathetic parts – the double standard dictated that a man could misbehave and get away with it, even be considered a charming rogue, while overwrought or aggressive women were termagants or bitches. Thanks to gender equity in the pain-in-the-ass department, women can now behave as badly as men, even worse! Still, I’m beginning to wonder how abrasive a heroine can be before losing her audience altogether. The Reinsve of Sentimental Value is nowhere near as relentlessly negative or aggressive as Rose Byrne in Mary Bronstein’s recent If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, or last year’s harpy Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. Or Jennifer Lawrence’s post-partum psychotic in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love.

Nothing Reinsve does in either film is as hair-curling as these performances, but her role is to bear the weight of a sadness so overwhelming as to threaten to sink her… and perhaps the film. The beginning is gently poetic – and premonitory. In voiceover Nora describes a writing assignment she had as a girl: to describe the world from the point of view of an object. She chooses her house – a handsome slightly ramshackle structure in a leafy neighbourhood – wonders whether it likes being full or empty, sees in the midst of its charm a fissure, ominous, a sign of crumbling from within. The metaphor is perfect for a film so exquisitely attuned to the emotions and presence, past and current, of one family and its crippling antagonisms: Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav, a film director and father of Nora and her younger and more pliant sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Father and daughters have been estranged for years but come together in the wake of the mother’s death. The house, redolent of its own theatricality and a character in its own right, now reverts to Gustav, and Agnes, with husband and small boy, must move out.

Gustav asks Nora to meet him in a pub, where he urges her to read his new script, and hopefully play the lead. She rejects him in no uncertain terms, and the scene between them is a masterclass of emotions, of pleading and rejection, conveyed through eyes, face, posture. In the alternation between anguish, hope and despair we see both the redeeming power of art but also its demands and its cruelties. Over and over, Gustav has made his cast and crew his family, while virtually abandoning his own. Now, even as he begs her to at least read the script, Gustav condescends to Nora about her acting career, refuses to attend one of her performances as he doesn’t like theatre. Yet we also feel the agony of a man at the end of his own career: he’s been treading water making documentaries; can he get financing for this new project, his last feature film? It’s a deeply personal project, the story of his mother (Nora’s grandmother) who died by suicide in the house. Gustav has already touched on this woman’s history. In a film within a film we see her as a girl, played by Agnes, fleeing the Nazis. Her real-life model will be captured and tortured.

At a retrospective of his work in Deauville he meets Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a well-known actress whom he enlists to play the lead. Fanning is also superb as she struggles with the part, wears a dark wig, becomes more Norwegian, but finally comes to realise the role is meant for Nora and no one else. She meets Nora to discuss it, and in the course of their conversation says, “I don’t know if the sadness that is an overwhelming part of her is the cause of everything or symptom of something deeper.”

Nora doesn’t quite know either. She’s tried to sublimate it into her performances, realises it’s there, is afraid of it; she’s stalled. Living in a world from which she has dissociated, she looks on her sister’s family almost as strangers. When it’s time to go through and dismantle the house, Agnes urges her to take some of its contents, whatever’s of sentimental value. Nora looks bemused and settles on just one item: a vase, after Agnes says it’s what she wants.

We come to realise that she bears the weight of an impenetrable melancholy in a family in which suicidal despair lurks just below the surface. The sadness, however, is by no means a black hole, but a thing of many colours and registers. Foremost is Reinsve’s incandescence, even at her lowest. The deft script, which Trier cowrote with Eskil Vogt, features tonal shifts, between melancholy and playful, sometimes both at once. Most magical are the elisions between the ‘real’ world and the artful one of stage and cinema. Orchestral moods alternate with American pop songs. And a rich palette (Kasper Tuxen is the cinematographer) subtly shifts from silvery darkness of night, host to meditation or loneliness, to vibrant colours of filmmaking or acting. Skarsgård among the film people at Deauville, prancing on a sun-drenched beach, is a different creature from the one we’ve encountered so far.

Agnes has been underrated precisely because of her seeming passivity, her unwillingness to claim our attention. She takes a backseat to the histrionic antics of sister and father, but her abiding acceptance is the strength that allows the family to come together and heal. In a powerfully moving scene near the end, the two sisters come together with a new closeness. They joke, talk about their upbringing, Nora wonders why, compared to her own craziness, Agnes came through relatively unscathed. “Because,” says Agnes, “I had you.” Agnes has read their father’s script and urges Nora to do so. It turns out that he knew so much more than they thought he did, about the darkness, the suicide attempts. By the close, both the house and the characters have gone through parallel transformations, and the film ends appropriately with the house as both home and sound stage, a merging of acting and being.

► Sentimental Value is in UK cinemas from 26 December.