Joachim Trier is a “seasons” guy. Sentimental Value opens on Oslo’s late summer canopy, and if you look closely (that is, if you’re into seasons, too) you’ll notice small bursts of orange presaging the fall. Inside the central family home, there are reminders to turn the gas off over the stove, backdoor escape routes, and windows open to overloud birdsong. The film, like the house, feels lived-in. The wardrobes are subtle but hardworking. It’s monochrome sets for the successful but “80% fucked up” Nora (Renata Rensve), bulky cardigans for her dependable sister Agnes, (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), dark and functional workwear for the their father, the auteur director (Stellan Skarsgård), and whatever’s on-trend for Hollywood starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who asks very American questions of her repressed Scandinavian counterparts.
Sentimental Value welcomes back viewers of Trier’s three prior Oslo films (Reprise; Oslo, August 31st; The Worst Person in the World) with familiar landmarks and faces. Anders Danielsen Lie moves from starring role to divorcé side character while Rensve leads again, but these resemblances elide the break between this film and his earlier ones. Sentimental Value is a psychological drama about family and art-making: Gustav wants to make a movie starring his estranged actress daughter, Nora, but she refuses, so he hires big name Rachel Kemp to get Netflix money. He casts his nephew, Agnes’s son, as well. The resentments these decisions unearth will be resolved in the making of his movie.
The films in the Oslo trilogy were existentialist, vital, and zeitgeisty. I feel about them the way I feel about my favorite podcasts: I like them a lot, but they’re embarrassing to like and don’t always age well. Reprise may as well have been subtitled “Karl Ove Knausgaard’s twenties: the movie.” It’s about being young and ambitious and friends with a bunch of wannabe punks who drop Deceptacon by Le Tigre to rally a party. But then, because it’s 2006, the main female lead out-manic-pixies Zooey Deschanel. In The Worst Person in the World, Julie (also played by Rensve), freewheels her way through her early thirties. What’s a woman to do when she has more liberties than all of her maternal ancestors, but no idea what to do with them? Eat a bunch of mushrooms and paint her face with a tampon. But the film takes cheap shots at feminist politics and leans on Freudian theory (daddy issues) to flatten Julie’s insecurities. It is at least, true to 2022, aware enough of how it might be criticized: Julie decides to cheat on her boyfriend while he’s rambling on about Freud. Oslo, August 31st—actually, this film from 2012 holds up, but then, its main character concludes it’s better to kill himself than rebuild by writing think-pieces on “Sex in the City through the eyes of Schopenhauer.”
I’ll take the au-currant faults of Trier’s old films over his latest well-crafted drama. The philosophical questions of what’s the point of all this and how to live now and, paraphrasing Camus, why don’t we all just kill ourselves, may be for the immature and childless, but they animated a trilogy that reveled in the feeling of freedom.
In Sentimental Value, the question of suicide is not philosophical. Suicide and depression run in the Borg line, but this unhappy family is not so unlike any other. Gustav is a good father to his lead actress and inconsistent toward his own children. He defends his selfishness by arguing that Joyce couldn’t have written Ulysses while going to kid’s soccer names and buying car insurance. An exchange of “I love you” between sisters is genuinely moving, and yes, sentimental: an expression of how deeply we need one another. Trier is still interested in how we live now—the tell of Nora’s depression is an open laptop on the kitchen table, as she spends her days streaming rather than working —but his inner realist won out over the existentialist. The old films may have been less mature, but so were their mosh pits and gatecrashing and late-night bike rides through Oslo.
At my screening, I sat behind a crew of young adults who ignored the previews and laughed through the opening credits, passing around a fifth of flavored vodka. How they’d ended up at an early screening of a tasteful Norwegian-language film is beyond me, and it doesn’t matter. Midway through the film, one of them began yakking. None jumped up to help, though two of the gang cracked up and left the theater for good. The puker went away for a bit, came back, and sat in the same spot (presumably stepping in it?), only to be whisper-scolded by a friend. The whole gang was straight out of Reprise, whose protagonists would have trolled the crowd at Sentimental Value and laughed about it afterwards. That’s living.
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