TIFF 50: "Sentimental Value" falls victim to high expectations

by Cláudio Alves

To be loved so intensely, showered in adoration by a captive captivated crowd and the world beyond, can be as much of a curse as it is a blessing. Those who follow film festivals and the awards that come after are very familiar with such pitfalls. After all, who among us hasn't gone to the theater, hyped on months of exhaustive praise for a title that, when all is said and done, isn't as special as you thought it would be? Last year at TIFF, I wrote about my disappointment with Anora and loathing of Emilia Pérez, which was made worse by the reputation both films had accrued at Cannes and the palpable affection you could feel emanating from the Toronto crowd. 

This year, I come to you with a similar experience, another Cannes darling that failed to meet the high expectations placed upon it. Sorry, folks, but Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value left me cold…

The Borg family is a mess. Gustav, the putative pater familias, is missing in action, having abandoned his daughters and wife decades ago, pursuing his directorial ambitions beyond Norwegian borders to Sweden, his father's motherland. Though he's been able to remain relatively courteous with his youngest, Agnes, the oldest daughter, Nora, wants nothing to do with him. The matriarch, Sissel, is forever unseen and too quickly forgotten by a script that doesn't know what to do with the character after using her death to kickstart the narrative into motion. She was a therapist, she was depressed, she scarred her daughters with her sadness, and now she's gone.

Her funeral brings Borg back to Norway, his daughters, and to the house whose walls witnessed his birth. The same walls that looked on as his mother took her own life, fifteen years after being liberated from Nazi incarceration. Touch every surface and you'll register the presence of memories stretching back a century over, pains, grief, joy that now causes pangs of nostalgia but used to feel too little. All of this is carved by time into the bedrock of its foundation, a cracked thing, sinking into the ground and slowly splitting the building. Generations to come will probably see the ruination of the whole thing. For now, it stands – a house, not a home. 

Collaborating again with DP Kasper Tuxen and production designer Jørgen Stangebye Larsen, Trier savors every opportunity to find immaterial life in the material space. Countless sequences find the camera savoring every nook and cranny, pondering rooms as they metamorphose from owner to owner, or just how the late-afternoon sun sneaks through unseen trees and window panes to dapple an ever-changing swath of wheat-colored light on the living room wall. This sense of place in its various physical and metaphysical permutations marks the best that the multi-chaptered Scandinavian drama has to offer.

Which is no small feat, I should specify. Because, though many episodes see the characters far away from the main setting, it still pulls at them wherever they go. For Gustav, this is especially true since, as many a master of cinema in their late style years, he plans on flirting with memoirist self-reflections for his next film. At first glance, it seems to be about his mother, to be shot at the house where the dreadful deed was done. Moreover, he wants Nora for the lead, complicating what was already a project weighted down by personal baggage. When she refuses, he's left without a way forward until Rachel Kemp, a Hollywood starlet who loves his work, enters the director's life.

Set to be financed by Netflix – hopefully it'll get a theatrical release, but the producer's face when the matter comes up doesn't inspire optimism – the masterpiece movie to be brings the characters together in Norway, forcing conversations, confrontations and reckonings a long time coming. From this premise, you can probably divine where every storyline will end and how it'll get to that resolution or lack thereof. Though figures like Nora are partly defined by their volatile emotions, all these characters come to us with pre-ordained arcs that feel too tidy and neatly assembled for the matter at hand.

For better and for worse, Trier and his troupe have invoked the memory of Bergman, a dangerous thing that invites unflattering comparisons. Because the Swedish auteur could present the most overtly constructed shots and writerly dialogues, directing his films within an inch of their lives, and still make you sense a wave of uncertainty roiling beneath the surface. Sometimes, it's almost primal, an unspeakable possibility threatening and outright contradicting the images' controlled appearance. At any moment, you feel these poor souls played by some of the best screen actors that have ever lived will slip and split themselves, make the screen bleed, and your consciousness shake. 

Much of Trier's approach as the writer and director of Sentimental Value seems to be about extending that formal control below the surface until it all stands still, currents tamed and denied. It wasn't always like this with the Norwegian wunderkind whose perspicacious portraits of bruised humanities have often been charged with a semblance of that same quality one finds in Bergman's films. Reprise's immaturity is a boon, as is Louder Than Bombs' unfairly criticized dysfunctions, or the void lurking unstable in Anders Danielsen Lie's gaze in Oslo, August 31, or Renate Reinsve's self-sabotaging mess of a young woman in The Worst Person in the World.

In those past works, script and style, form and function, conspired to encircle these humanities within a cinematic shape that, nevertheless, avoided boxing them in and, through that process, limit their complexities. With its penchant for circularity in structure, well-worn adages about artist who can only communicate through their art, narrated lyricisms and whatnot, Sentimental Value almost feels too polished for its own good. It needed more toothiness, dammit. As it stands, I could recognize all the emotional responses it wanted from me as its audience, but found myself contemplating such feelings rather than experiencing them firsthand.

A certain whiff of scripting indulgences doesn't help matters, exactly because the indulgence doesn't sit indulgent in the film's final form. I guess the flourish of three portraits juxtaposed over the void and under shifting lights might count since, even now, I question its purpose. Like many things in Sentimental Value, it underlines a point already made ten times over, articulating the same idea as if afraid the audience might miss the theses Trier is working through. While I'm not one to complain about length and repetition, you've got to kill your darlings here and there. Though it flows nicely and never falls into turpitude, I can't say I didn't feel the time passing as Sentimental Value unfolded across its 133 minutes.

It all contributes to a frustrating viewing experience, everything so obviously well-made that it makes the description of its sparse but inimical insufficiencies come across as pedantic contrarianism. But let me soothe the impulse for vitriol and praise what warrants commendation. Namely, the cast, since I've already mentioned the miracle of set and cinematography around the family property. Much has been said about Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav, and there is nary an exaggeration in sight. He is, indeed, superlative as a man whose charm strike his daughters like an insult and whose agonies often project a disguise of arrogance that does nothing but make him more utterly alone.

There are moments in Sentimental Value where Skarsgård performs an epic poem's worth of earth-shaking realizations through nothing more than the whirlpools of his eyes as they observe a colleague's fragile state, a protégé's upward failure, a daughter's scorn, and another's incredulity. Reinsve has a trickier part with Nora, but still sails smoothly through the characterization. She's so in tune with Trier's approach that my general misgivings about Sentimental Value as a whole can't help but be reflected in her work. But, just as my feelings for the film as a whole, it'd be a lie to say she's delivering anything less than good work.

But, as far as I'm concerned, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning steal the show as Agnes and Rachel, respectively. The former makes the film's most fundamentally reactive part sing, seeming as if she's acting at the margins of the action even when the episodic structure puts her front and center for a passage or two. The latter attacks a role that's even trickier than Reinsve's with a delicate balance between sincerity and the possibility of ridicule. In essence, Fanning enriches a figure who exists to be cyclically reduced to a prism through which the Borgs can discover themselves and Trier can poke fun at the Hollywood establishment he still tentatively courts.

At TIFF 50, Sentimental Value played as part of the Special Screenings program. It'll be theatrically released by NEON later this year, on November 7.