Sentimental Value
2025
Today, I got to decide what film would wrap up my movie watching for 2025. I considered some old favorites but decided to celebrate New Year’s Eve by renting an awards contender that I had missed when it came to theatres far away. I looked through Fandango At Home and narrowed it down to five films. Rabbit Trap (which is not on the awards radar but something I had wanted to see) was first to go, when every description of it called it folk horror. Sorry, Dev Patel, but I don’t do folk horror. Next, I eliminated The Mastermind because it was in English, meaning that I could watch it with someone else another time more easily. Finally, I watched the trailer for Little Amelie or the Character of Rain, but the footage didn’t quite live up to the title. That left me with two probable Best Picture nominees (there will be multiple foreign-language films in that category this year): It Was Only an Accident and Sentimental Value. I chose the latter because it was probably less depressing—though I knew it would be depressing.
Sentimental Value is director Joachim Trier's follow-up to his breakout movie, The Worst Person in the World…which I really disliked but somehow rated 4 stars in 2021. Trier’s usual leading lady, Renate Reinsve, once again stars, along with Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. It is in Norwegian and English and concerns a film director (Skarsgård), his loenly theatre actress daughter (Reinsve), his married daughter (Lilleaas), and the American starlet he casts in his latest film (Fanning). This quartet has many twisting and difficult relations among it, especially between Skarsgård and Reinsve. Also in the mix are the histories of their ancestors, especially the director’s mother.
The acting is great. Fanning is weakest, but part of that is her character. I winced through a monologue she delivered only to respect it later, when Reinsve performed the same monologue perfectly. Clearly, we were meant to register the difference in quality. It’s not easy to act as if you're acting badly. The music is great—both score and songs. We see very short glimpses of theatre productions that I wanted to crawl into the screen and watch instead. (That’s good design work.) It is an effective and affecting film, though perhaps a bit too Persona-y for me.
The movie’s theme is generational trauma. The sins of the mother are visited on the descending generations, manifesting in several variations in each person. Therefore, the characters (as in The Worst Person in the World) are not particularly nice or good. They are real and really damaged. The film draws towards a slight resolution, but it is halting and only the beginning of restoration for a family that keeps acting out its past tragedies.
Writing this review, I think I’ve talked myself into a 4-star rating instead of my intended 3.5, and that’s a good sign. I just hope that in four years, I don’t look back and think, “I gave that film four stars? I could have sworn I hated it.”