Is a home a witness?
Does it matter that these floors are the same wood that generations have walked on, or that this wall supports your body as you slouch against it just as it has supported the bodies of those before you?
Are these walls alive?
Nora and Agnes, the sister duo at the heart of Joachim Trier’s newest film, Sentimental Value, wouldn’t think so. After their depressive psychoanalyst mother—long separated from their famous film-directing father, Gustav—passes away, the two hope to sell their childhood home. Agnes, with a family of her own, is concerned with finances and Nora, a famous stage actress, is indifferent to it staying in the family.
This plan is upset when Gustav, who has now been both out of work and the family for the better part of two decades, returns unannounced to his ex-wife’s funeral. To the surprise of his daughters, he never relinquished his legal rights to the house despite his departure from the family. He too comes with news: he has written his next movie part for the now-estranged Nora. Shot in their childhood home—both Gustav, Nora, and Agnes all grew up within its walls—the film loosely alludes to the suicide of Gustav’s own mother during his childhood.
Sentimental Value thus follows Gustav’s attempts to finish this final film, his struggles with his daughters, and their own struggles to leave lives of their own in the wake of their father’s sudden resurgence into their world.
Sentimental Value defies categorization. In just two hours, this movie covers stage, art, film production, aging, father-daughter relationships, sibling bonds, depression, international trauma, modern love, and the Netflix-ification of cinema as a whole. At its heart, however, this is a movie about simple things: pain, love, and place.
Sentimental Value is a testament to the spaces we inhabit, a love letter to the walls and floors that have cradled our bodies and the bodies of those who came long before us. The house—which has belonged to the Borg family for at least four generations—has seen death, births, prison camps, rebellions, divorce, love, life, and everything else too nuanced to list. In her school composition, a young Nora imagines the house as a living being. It likes the sound of laughter the children make when they play; it prefers the “fullness” of people. It dislikes being empty. Most of all, it dislikes the angry “noise” made by Nora’s parents in the evenings. The silence Gustav’s absence leaves is no better. The walls of the Borg house are thus alive, paying witness to the generations that circle in and out of the red-gabled Oslo home.
Trier has always been a psychologist. His previous works—six films over the past ten years, including The Worst Person in the World—largely center on the struggles of our interior lives. He is nothing if not a chronicler of the human condition, and Sentimental Value is simply another demonstration of that talent.
Simply put, he gets it. He gets what it means to be an aging father whose heart is beginning to give out, who misses his daughters so dearly that he calls them drunk each night on the couch, and who still cannot understand how one goes about loving these daughters. Simultaneously, he gets what it means to be the daughter of such a father: to witness her father betray both her and himself in stunning fashion, to watch his fruitless attempts at fatherly love, and to struggle with the same depression he did.
Trier understands what it means to witness your friends—the ones you once knew to be strong and mighty—grow old and frail, and to know the same fate awaits you. When Gustav visits his longtime collaborator and cinematographer, he is horrified to discover his friend’s frailty. He is unable to hide the abject terror on his face from his friend as he watches him take five minutes to rise from his chair, shakily standing with only the help of two canes.
Nora’s sister, Agnes, must watch her for suicidality; Nora wants nothing more than her father to attend one of her plays. He refuses not because he does not want to go see her work, as he says to Nora, but because he simply cannot stand the theater. When Nora’s married lover finally gets a divorce, he rebukes her attempts to make their love public. Gustav, unable to get Nora to star in his film, hires famous American actress Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning. She, unsurprisingly, fails to be his daughter, even after she dyes her hair the exact same shade as Nora’s and adopts a Norwegian accent.
The chief question Sentimental Value asks, then, is one of forgiveness. Are we capable of forgiving each other—for growing old, faltering, failing, drinking heavily, loving wrongly, doing wrongly, for being ourselves, in the grand spite of it all?
Trier’s answer is not absolute.
There is no stunning declaration of love, or dramatic reconciliation of father and daughter, sister and sister. Instead, his answer lies in the subtle corners of this film. We are given moments of levity. Gustav gives his five-year old grandchild a DVD of the Piano Teacher in what he says will be the best education of maternal relationships and women. The sisters embrace each other in solace over their childhood. Nora eventually reads the script her father has been begging her to, discovering that he perhaps knows her far better than she ever thought. In these little moments, Trier makes his argument. We are capable of forgiveness.
This is not the perfect film. At times, it attempts to say too much while giving itself too little time to explore any one thing. In the third quarter, there are lulls—scenes run for too long and added stories bloat the plot. The revelation that, despite his absence, Gustav’s script somehow understands Nora’s depression and previous suicide attempt—that no matter the distance, there is something bonding their souls and experience, that there is some love to be had between this irreconcilable pair—is weakened by the exorbitant amount of time it takes for the script to reach Nora. As beautiful as they are, carefully-shot vignettes of the motions of Oslo cultural life can only be strung together so many times before it begins to feel like an odd overwrought commercial.
Still, few, if any, current filmmakers understand the complexity of human relationships more than Trier. Possessing an apparently intimate knowledge of human pain—what causes us to suffer, to hurt those we love, and to hurt ourselves—he is capable of portraying struggle with such stunning vulnerability that it is far too easy to recognize yourself on his screen. For it is a struggle to exist, and it is a struggle to exist with others.
Trier seems to think we can do so with grace. The barriers we find between others and within ourselves are not insurmountable. The dark corners of life will not remain that way forever. And a house that has seen much pain—a house in which people have lost their lives, marriages, and minds—has also seen much light.
Yes, Sentimental Value tells us, these walls are alive. And yes, we are capable of forgiveness.