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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Coupledom is very oppressing': Swedish author Gun-Britt Sundström on the revival of her cult anti-marriage novel
At a glance, Engagement, Gun-Britt Sundström's classic novel of the 1970s, looks like a conventional story of young student love floundering in the face of ambivalence. The 79-year-old author, who is speaking via video call while cat-sitting for her son at his house outside Stockholm, has been taken aback by the novel's return to favour. For a long time, Sundström tried to distance herself from Engagement, as writers will of their most famous book. But readers wouldn't let her forget, and now, with publication of the first English translation, the million-plus-selling novelist and translator is enjoying a resurgence. Recently, says Sundström, 'a young woman – in her 50s, which is young to me nowadays! – told me she had been given the book as a present from her father at 16 and it had changed her life. It had made her feel seen.' Sundström shrugs as if to say: this is nuts, but what can you do? Engagement is not, after all, a traditional love story, but a study of a young woman's fierce resistance to what she feels is the oppressive effect of being loved by a man. Martina and Gustav meet at college. Gustav wants their relationship to progress along traditional lines, an ambition that, Martina feels, risks leading her like a sleepwalker into a tedious, conventional life. At the casual level the pair's relationship is loving and stable, but, observes Martina caustically, 'Gustav is building so many structures on top of it that it's shaking underneath them'. She wants to be loved but she also wants to be alone. She wants Gustav to stop repeating himself. When he asks her what's wrong, she muses, 'you can't answer something like that. You can't tell someone who wants to be with you always that he should be reasonable and ration himself out a little – if I saw you half as often, I would like you four times as much – no, you can't say that.' The novel is often described as a 'feminist classic', which Sundström resists – the implication being that any political objective undermines its integrity as a novel. 'Feminist books ordinarily end with a happy divorce. And this doesn't.' Instead, Engagement is a dense, thoughtful book that takes on questions of sex, boredom, self-esteem and what Sundström calls, 'the moral issue; the question of can you treat another person this way, the way Martina [treats Gustav]? At the end, she herself comes to the conclusion that you can't, it isn't right. She can't go on exploiting him, because he's helplessly in love with her.' The book is less about the experience of loving someone than about being the object of love, and given current discussions around young women 'decentring men' and 'heteropessimism', it is a startlingly modern novel. It is also a dark comedy, something Sundström says tends to be overlooked. 'It is a funny book! I often regretted that reviewers failed to mention that aspect.' How could it not be? Sundström herself is full of merriment. She turns 80 this summer and says, 'I can't believe it myself. Most of my friends are more or less the same age, and none of us can believe it. We are the young ones, aren't we?' With her pageboy hairstyle and unlined face, she could be comfortably 20 years younger. ('Genes,' she says, flatly.) At the beginning of our conversation, Sundström mentions she is going through old diaries wondering what to keep and what to burn. 'I'm cleaning up with the perspective of soon dying,' she says, matter of factly, and although the gentle art of Swedish death cleaning is a well-known phenomenon, it strikes me that even for a Swede, Sundström is thrillingly, inspiringly brisk. Like her protagonist, she is also immune from groupthink to the point of awkwardness. In the novel, Martina wonders: 'How can it be that most people lack self-confidence? And how can it be that I have enough self-confidence for an entire army? Of course I am beautiful and intelligent, at least intelligent enough to consider myself pretty enough – but that doesn't usually help, does it?' It is still mildly confronting to read a young woman calmly assessing herself in this way, and Martina's confidence is Sundström's, the development of which goes all the way back to two key influences in her childhood. She was a great reader and identified most with swashbuckling heroes – the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Three Musketeers. And, along with her family, she attended a progressive Swedish church. 'I grew up imagining that, to God, we are all equal and that my relationship to God, if I had one, was just as important as any man's.' Sundström's political development as a feminist, meanwhile, was influenced by the cautionary tale of her mother's life. Sundström's father was a journalist, while her mother gave up work to raise Sundström and her sister in what, looking back, the novelist calls 'a kind of tragedy'. Although she was never bitter, Sundström recognises that she was, 'in a way, disappointed'. The hardship of her mother's generation makes Sundström sceptical of some aspects of the modern feminist movement, which she thinks has failed to acknowledge just how much has been gained. 'We've had a backlash. Unfortunately, we were freer in my generation than in my children's. My daughter told me she's envious of my youth in that respect. They are much more concerned about their looks than we had to be back then. So many young people don't have self-confidence nowadays.' Sundström started writing as a child, in journals and diaries, and at some point in late adolescence started to feel that it was inevitable she would write a book. In 1966, she published Student-64, a novel of rebellious youth, and 10 years later came Engagement, her third novel and a huge and instant hit. Since then, she has written 14 further books, six of them for children, and in a tone of dismay wonders if becoming a novelist was perhaps a mistake. She is also a translator and found working alongside Kathy Saranpa, the English translator for the new edition of Engagement, an interesting exercise in learning to let go. (After the interview, Sundström emails to correct several English words she used and for which she has thought of more precise translations.) 'I'm very good at Swedish language, and I regret a bit that I didn't devote my life to linguistics instead of literature,' she says. 'It's awful to say, but I don't think literature is all that interesting. There are more interesting things in life. Language; etymologies; the developing of different languages.' In Swedish, the novel is called Maken (The Husband) and she wonders if 'Mate' would've been a better title in English. 'I learned that 'mate' was originally written with a 'k'. So it is 'make', originally.' There is a puzzled silence. 'But that doesn't help.' Or, she wonders, ''Uncoupling': I think that would've been pretty adequate. Both as a criticism of the idea of coupledom, and also the problems of divorcing.' Sundström herself has been divorced for 30 years and for the past few decades has had a romantic partner with whom she doesn't live. 'To me,' she says, 'it's the ideal; to be a couple, and to see each other when we wish, and still have our own lives. And not least because each of us has children with different parents. I never wanted to be a stepmother, and I didn't want him to be a stepfather to my children because they had their own father.' Although, she adds, 'I'm very thankful for the years I was in a family in the traditional way.' She recalls driving with her husband at the wheel and two children in the back thinking how lucky she was. 'An ideal! And it's me!' This is a classic example of Sundström's resistance to any one hard and fast position. She gravitates naturally away from political orthodoxy and believes – the translator's curse, perhaps – there is always more than one way to see things. 'By nature, I'm allergic to everything that is the truth of the day,' she says. 'You know, everybody writes the same things in the papers. For example, the #MeToo movement; it wasn't possible to make any objections in that discussion. I would never have said anything publicly then, but I didn't feel quite happy about it; these demonstrations against the Swedish Academy [which awards the Nobel prize in literature], organised as a kind of feminist action. I felt very strange [about] all that; it seemed simplifying. All conflicts can't be seen in that context.' These are the ambiguities Sundström tackles so well in her fiction, where she can allow all the nuances absent in the headlines to play out. She created Engagement's Martina as neither heroine nor cautionary tale, which is why she continues to be surprised at the fervour with which some young women take her up as a role model. A few years ago, she says, 'I met a young girl who showed me her copy of Maken, and it was full of Post-its. And she said, 'When I'm in trouble, or unsure of something, I think: what would Martina say?'' Sundström looks astonished. 'I don't know if I am supposed to be happy about that. Not for a moment was it my intention to propagate anything at all.' Instead, she conceived of the book while going through a period of being single, wondering about the long-term prospects of any relationship, and thinking that, as the culture war around marriage and divorce in the 1970s took hold, it might be good grist for a novel. 'In 1976 the Swedish king got married, and all of us radicals, of course, were republicans – I have been a member of the republican association for as long as I can remember. And although [regard for the monarchy] wasn't as mad as it is in Britain, I really was depressed about people engaging with that bloody wedding. And me walking around feeling single.' She laughs. 'This idea of coupledom is even more oppressing to young people today than it was in my day. That means it is very oppressing.' We return to the subject of death. Sundström's parents were unhistrionic about it too, she says. 'My mother was a widow for five years, and when she was in hospital, I asked her: 'Are you afraid of dying?' And she seemed surprised at the question. 'No! Why should I be?'' They didn't talk about her being reunited with Sundström's father, which is something, she notes disapprovingly, that people extend to their cats and dogs these days. 'Imagine... what a crowd.' As it was, her parents, 'were both so very calm, because they had lived in the conviction that this world isn't the only one'. This is not what Sundström believes. And yet, thanks to those admirable, religious people in her background, she sees the world much as they did, in terms of social engagement. If she was young now, she says, 'I'd be a Greta Thunberg'. For Sundström, to look at the world and see potential for something better puts the novelist and the activist in a single category: those with the ability 'to imagine something else than this world'. Engagement by Gun-Britt Sundström, translated by Kathy Saranpa, is published by Penguin Modern Classics (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Coupledom is very oppressing': Swedish author Gun-Britt Sundström on the revival of her cult anti-marriage novel
At a glance, Engagement, Gun-Britt Sundström's classic novel of the 1970s, looks like a conventional story of young student love floundering in the face of ambivalence. The 79-year-old author, who is speaking via video call while cat-sitting for her son at his house outside Stockholm, has been taken aback by the novel's return to favour. For a long time, Sundström tried to distance herself from Engagement, as writers will of their most famous book. But readers wouldn't let her forget, and now, with publication of the first English translation, the million-plus-selling novelist and translator is enjoying a resurgence. Recently, says Sundström, 'a young woman – in her 50s, which is young to me nowadays! – told me she had been given the book as a present from her father at 16 and it had changed her life. It had made her feel seen.' Sundström shrugs as if to say: this is nuts, but what can you do? Engagement is not, after all, a traditional love story, but a study of a young woman's fierce resistance to what she feels is the oppressive effect of being loved by a man. Martina and Gustav meet at college. Gustav wants their relationship to progress along traditional lines, an ambition that, Martina feels, risks leading her like a sleepwalker into a tedious, conventional life. At the casual level the pair's relationship is loving and stable, but, observes Martina caustically, 'Gustav is building so many structures on top of it that it's shaking underneath them'. She wants to be loved but she also wants to be alone. She wants Gustav to stop repeating himself. When he asks her what's wrong, she muses, 'you can't answer something like that. You can't tell someone who wants to be with you always that he should be reasonable and ration himself out a little – if I saw you half as often, I would like you four times as much – no, you can't say that.' The novel is often described as a 'feminist classic', which Sundström resists – the implication being that any political objective undermines its integrity as a novel. 'Feminist books ordinarily end with a happy divorce. And this doesn't.' Instead, Engagement is a dense, thoughtful book that takes on questions of sex, boredom, self-esteem and what Sundström calls, 'the moral issue; the question of can you treat another person this way, the way Martina [treats Gustav]? At the end, she herself comes to the conclusion that you can't, it isn't right. She can't go on exploiting him, because he's helplessly in love with her.' The book is less about the experience of loving someone than about being the object of love, and given current discussions around young women 'decentring men' and 'heteropessimism', it is a startlingly modern novel. It is also a dark comedy, something Sundström says tends to be overlooked. 'It is a funny book! I often regretted that reviewers failed to mention that aspect.' How could it not be? Sundström herself is full of merriment. She turns 80 this summer and says, 'I can't believe it myself. Most of my friends are more or less the same age, and none of us can believe it. We are the young ones, aren't we?' With her pageboy hairstyle and unlined face, she could be comfortably 20 years younger. ('Genes,' she says, flatly.) At the beginning of our conversation, Sundström mentions she is going through old diaries wondering what to keep and what to burn. 'I'm cleaning up with the perspective of soon dying,' she says, matter of factly, and although the gentle art of Swedish death cleaning is a well-known phenomenon, it strikes me that even for a Swede, Sundström is thrillingly, inspiringly brisk. Like her protagonist, she is also immune from groupthink to the point of awkwardness. In the novel, Martina wonders: 'How can it be that most people lack self-confidence? And how can it be that I have enough self-confidence for an entire army? Of course I am beautiful and intelligent, at least intelligent enough to consider myself pretty enough – but that doesn't usually help, does it?' It is still mildly confronting to read a young woman calmly assessing herself in this way, and Martina's confidence is Sundström's, the development of which goes all the way back to two key influences in her childhood. She was a great reader and identified most with swashbuckling heroes – the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Three Musketeers. And, along with her family, she attended a progressive Swedish church. 'I grew up imagining that, to God, we are all equal and that my relationship to God, if I had one, was just as important as any man's.' Sundström's political development as a feminist, meanwhile, was influenced by the cautionary tale of her mother's life. Sundström's father was a journalist, while her mother gave up work to raise Sundström and her sister in what, looking back, the novelist calls 'a kind of tragedy'. Although she was never bitter, Sundström recognises that she was, 'in a way, disappointed'. The hardship of her mother's generation makes Sundström sceptical of some aspects of the modern feminist movement, which she thinks has failed to acknowledge just how much has been gained. 'We've had a backlash. Unfortunately, we were freer in my generation than in my children's. My daughter told me she's envious of my youth in that respect. They are much more concerned about their looks than we had to be back then. So many young people don't have self-confidence nowadays.' Sundström started writing as a child, in journals and diaries, and at some point in late adolescence started to feel that it was inevitable she would write a book. In 1966, she published Student-64, a novel of rebellious youth, and 10 years later came Engagement, her third novel and a huge and instant hit. Since then, she has written 14 further books, six of them for children, and in a tone of dismay wonders if becoming a novelist was perhaps a mistake. She is also a translator and found working alongside Kathy Saranpa, the English translator for the new edition of Engagement, an interesting exercise in learning to let go. (After the interview, Sundström emails to correct several English words she used and for which she has thought of more precise translations.) 'I'm very good at Swedish language, and I regret a bit that I didn't devote my life to linguistics instead of literature,' she says. 'It's awful to say, but I don't think literature is all that interesting. There are more interesting things in life. Language; etymologies; the developing of different languages.' In Swedish, the novel is called Maken (The Husband) and she wonders if 'Mate' would've been a better title in English. 'I learned that 'mate' was originally written with a 'k'. So it is 'make', originally.' There is a puzzled silence. 'But that doesn't help.' Or, she wonders, ''Uncoupling': I think that would've been pretty adequate. Both as a criticism of the idea of coupledom, and also the problems of divorcing.' Sundström herself has been divorced for 30 years and for the past few decades has had a romantic partner with whom she doesn't live. 'To me,' she says, 'it's the ideal; to be a couple, and to see each other when we wish, and still have our own lives. And not least because each of us has children with different parents. I never wanted to be a stepmother, and I didn't want him to be a stepfather to my children because they had their own father.' Although, she adds, 'I'm very thankful for the years I was in a family in the traditional way.' She recalls driving with her husband at the wheel and two children in the back thinking how lucky she was. 'An ideal! And it's me!' This is a classic example of Sundström's resistance to any one hard and fast position. She gravitates naturally away from political orthodoxy and believes – the translator's curse, perhaps – there is always more than one way to see things. 'By nature, I'm allergic to everything that is the truth of the day,' she says. 'You know, everybody writes the same things in the papers. For example, the #MeToo movement; it wasn't possible to make any objections in that discussion. I would never have said anything publicly then, but I didn't feel quite happy about it; these demonstrations against the Swedish Academy [which awards the Nobel prize in literature], organised as a kind of feminist action. I felt very strange [about] all that; it seemed simplifying. All conflicts can't be seen in that context.' These are the ambiguities Sundström tackles so well in her fiction, where she can allow all the nuances absent in the headlines to play out. She created Engagement's Martina as neither heroine nor cautionary tale, which is why she continues to be surprised at the fervour with which some young women take her up as a role model. A few years ago, she says, 'I met a young girl who showed me her copy of Maken, and it was full of Post-its. And she said, 'When I'm in trouble, or unsure of something, I think: what would Martina say?'' Sundström looks astonished. 'I don't know if I am supposed to be happy about that. Not for a moment was it my intention to propagate anything at all.' Instead, she conceived of the book while going through a period of being single, wondering about the long-term prospects of any relationship, and thinking that, as the culture war around marriage and divorce in the 1970s took hold, it might be good grist for a novel. 'In 1976 the Swedish king got married, and all of us radicals, of course, were republicans – I have been a member of the republican association for as long as I can remember. And although [regard for the monarchy] wasn't as mad as it is in Britain, I really was depressed about people engaging with that bloody wedding. And me walking around feeling single.' She laughs. 'This idea of coupledom is even more oppressing to young people today than it was in my day. That means it is very oppressing.' We return to the subject of death. Sundström's parents were unhistrionic about it too, she says. 'My mother was a widow for five years, and when she was in hospital, I asked her: 'Are you afraid of dying?' And she seemed surprised at the question. 'No! Why should I be?'' They didn't talk about her being reunited with Sundström's father, which is something, she notes disapprovingly, that people extend to their cats and dogs these days. 'Imagine... what a crowd.' As it was, her parents, 'were both so very calm, because they had lived in the conviction that this world isn't the only one'. This is not what Sundström believes. And yet, thanks to those admirable, religious people in her background, she sees the world much as they did, in terms of social engagement. If she was young now, she says, 'I'd be a Greta Thunberg'. For Sundström, to look at the world and see potential for something better puts the novelist and the activist in a single category: those with the ability 'to imagine something else than this world'. Engagement by Gun-Britt Sundström, translated by Kathy Saranpa, is published by Penguin Modern Classics (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
American Press
4 days ago
- Politics
- American Press
Louisiana cancels $3B coastal restoration project
The beachfront in Cameron Parish has been pounded by number of tropical storms and hurricanes in recent years, including Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Ike, and Gustav. (Coast Protection and Restoration Authority) Louisiana officially canceled a $3 billion coastal restoration funded by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement money, state and federal agencies confirmed Thursday. The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project had been intended to rebuild upward of 20 square miles of land in southeast Louisiana to combat sea level rise and erosion on the Gulf Coast. The money must be used on coastal restoration and it was not immediately clear if the $618 million the state has already spent will have to be returned, as federal trustees warned last year. Conservation groups and other supporters of the project stressed it was an ambitious, science-based approach to mitigating the worst effects of a vanishing coastline in a state where a football field of land is lost every 100 minutes. The project would have diverted sediment-laden water from the Mississippi River to restore wetlands disappearing due to a range of factors including climate-change induced sea level rise and a vast river levee system that choked off natural land regeneration. 'The science has not changed, nor has the need for urgent action,' said Kim Reyher, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. 'What has changed is the political landscape.' While the project had largely received bipartisan support and was championed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry became a vocal opponent after taking office last year. He recoiled at the price and amplified concerns that the massive influx of freshwater would destroy fisheries that local communities rely on for their livelihoods. Landry has said the project would 'break' Louisiana's culture of shrimp and oyster harvesting and compared it to government efforts a century ago to punish schoolchildren for speaking Cajun French. 'We fought this battle a long time, but Gov. Landry is the reason we won this battle,' said Mitch Jurisich, chair of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, who was suing the state over the project's environmental impacts. 'He really turned the tide.' The Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group, a coalition of federal agencies overseeing settlement funds from the 2010 Gulf oil spill, said in a Thursday statement that the Mid-Barataria project is 'no longer viable' for a range of reasons including litigation and the suspension of a federal permit after the state issued a stop-work order on the project. A spokesperson for Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority confirmed to The Associated Press that the state is canceling the project.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Norwegian Director Joachim Trier Talks ‘Sentimental Value': ‘People That Deny Emotions Make Terrible Choices'
'Brat' summer is dead — long live 'Joachim Trier Summer,' as proclaimed by Elle Fanning, and her playful T-shirt, at Cannes. 'After three years of hard work, I'd love to have a three-year-long summer,' laughs the Danish-born Norwegian director after the premiere of 'Sentimental Value.' More from Variety 'Aisha Can't Fly Away' Review: Buliana Simon Stuns in Morad Mostafa's Intriguing if Uneven Immigrant Tale 'Resurrection' Review: Bi Gan's Extravagant Act of Surrender to the Seductions of a Century of Cinema 'The Party's Over' Review: South of France-Set Satire Follows an Escalating Class Conflict Starring Renate Reinsve — reuniting with Trier after the hit 'The Worst Person in the World' — Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Fanning, it premiered to rave reviews. But unlike some other Palme d'Or contenders, it touched the audience as well. 'I'm grateful and a bit exhausted, but most of all relieved. I had a feeling yesterday that people received it well, and I was in a room with a lot of love. It's an emotional, personal piece of cinema,' he tells Variety. In the film, sisters Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Lilleaas) have to say goodbye to their late mother — and hello to their absentee father Gustav, a film director struggling to get new feature off the ground. But he recently wrote a script about his own mom, who killed himself when he was a boy. And wants the newly famous Nora to play the lead. Although he's talking about a fellow director, Trier 'doesn't feel like Gustav,' he says. 'I started writing it from the perspective of the sisters and then I tried to humanize Gustav. He comes from a completely different generation; he's a part of that '80s, '90s cinema. But you're right: maybe I'm exercising my anxieties of what it's like to come to an end of a directorial career?' He adds: 'That's why I like Westerns: so many of them are about the end of an era. That's just the way things go. Many people from that generation are slowly fading away from our industry, and one day it'll be my turn.' Before he wanders away like John Wayne in 'The Searchers,' Trier's happy to talk about 'Sentimental Value' and the main trio who's back at their old house and facing old secrets — including that of Gustav's mother's past. 'The hardest part was to represent the past traumas of the Second World War, which I know from my family. It takes it into a slightly more political or historical perspective than I have in some of my other films. I grew up with a grandfather who was in the resistance and was tremendously traumatized: he was caught and barely survived. It created a climate of survival in the homes of our parents'. And that affected emotional communication.' Trier 'wanted to explore how inherited grief travels through the house and through the family.' Working with regular co-writer Eskil Vogt made it easier to get some distance. 'There's also this notion of humanist cinema. I can't write about antagonists, even though the world is all about that right now. The antagonist and 'the other' as an enemy. It doesn't interest me. I'm interested in understanding the complexity of why people end up hurting and disappointing each other. I'm interested in tenderness. I think it comes from the director's personality as well. I genuinely … like people. I'm an extrovert and I'm curious. And if some find that style too 'emotional,' fuck it. That's who I am.' Gustav's avoiding emotions, which makes things hard for his daughters. But at least he can write a script. 'That's the core of the story: that's all he can do. In the beginning, we think he's an asshole for doing it. We think he's trying to benefit from Nora's fame. I'm generalizing a bit, but Gustav Borg, and other men of his generation, weren't raised with the capacity for that emotional, tender language,' he says. 'I get asked a lot about gender perspectives on characters. I need these characters to be myself as well. They're me and then they are not. I know Renate, so she can come back with some feedback. But why should it be easier to write a man like Gustav, so much older than me, than to write a woman who's closer to my age?' he wonders. 'Me, I was [allowed to cry]. I used to skateboard, and we did talk a lot about emotions, but we were also kind of tough. I broke my arms and legs, and that's not when you cry. There's this kind of shamefulness around it, but people that deny emotions make terrible choices.' A third-generation filmmaker, he's had a camera in his hands all his life. 'It's easier for me than writing or doing anything else.' But while Gustav hires U.S. star (Fanning) to act in his English-language movie, Trier enjoys his own way of working for now. 'When I grew up, everyone was playing music. I was a shitty drummer and got kicked out of the punk band I was in. But I'm a filmmaker now, and I try to have the same band,' he says. 'This industry is so big. I love experimentation, and I love mainstream, but I'd say: Maybe we can do something in between? That's a big question: Can you stay at home and be successful? Right now, I'm experiencing my dream, which was to be a local band that had fans around the world. 'Fans' sounds a bit pretentious, but at least an audience,' he says. 'With this one, it really felt like we were in it for the right reasons. We have Neon in the U.S., and they're doing a great job, but what's Hollywood today, really? I love the fact we have films with Tom Cruise, and I will see 'Mission: Impossible,' but I'd never compromise the kind of creative control I've had from film one. I don't know another system that could offer me this way of working.' He doesn't take it for granted, he admits. 'With every film, I have this little demon at the back of my head, telling me it's the last one. You never feel safe. Making a film means always going through a little bit of a crisis. I remember reading an interview with Philip Roth once, and he said that with every new book, it felt impossible. I found it so comforting.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Sentimental Value' Review: Joachim Trier's Resonant Family Drama Treats a Beautiful Old House as the Foundation for Healing
I tend to think of 'therapy through filmmaking' as a bad thing, by which I mean that artists with unresolved personal issues would do better to sort those matters out in private. Joachim Trier's 'Sentimental Value' offers an inspiring exception, where the psychological health of its two main characters — filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) and his estranged daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) — winds up inextricably tied up with a film project Gustav meant for them to make together. If it works here, that's because we're not obliged to watch Gustav's movie, but the emotional behind-the-scenes story of reconciliation through art. While not as stylistically radical as Trier's last film, 'The Worst Person in the World,' this layered family-centric drama (which was also written by Eskil Vogt) shares its ability to find fresh angles on sentiments you'd think that cinema would have exhausted by now. Obviously, chief among the previous movie's revelations was its star, Reinsve, who recalls the laid-back, lived-in and yet entirely modern allure of Diane Keaton during Woody Allen's peak years, mixed with an unpredictability that can feel positively radiant one second and practically inconsolable the next. More from Variety 'A Useful Ghost' Review: A Haunted Vacuum Cleaner Hoovers Up Attention in Pleasingly Particular Ghost Story Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor Make Cannes Sob With Powerful Gay Romance 'The History of Sound,' Which Earns 6-Minute Standing Ovation Cannes Critics' Week Awards Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's 'A Useful Ghost' In 'Sentimental Value,' one doesn't have to look far to see the source of Nora's torment: the dad who walked out on her family when she and younger sister Agnes were children. Gustav always put his work ahead of his personal life, but it's been ages since he made a great movie. Now, at precisely the moment the girls' mother (and his ex-wife) has passed away, he shows up with a screenplay he wants to shoot in the house where they grew up — a gorgeous two-story Dragestil mansion so significant to the story that it gets a poetic introduction all its own at the outset. He wrote the lead role with Nora in mind, and we sense that accepting could save their relationship, if not both of their lives. If that sounds a little dramatic, that's only because you have yet to meet Nora, a jumble of nerves whose stage fright is so intense, it nearly craters her latest show on opening night. Not since 'Birdman' has a director so deftly (or hilariously) captured the suffocating panic of a backstage breakdown, as she tears at her costume and begs a fellow actor to slip her some drugs, or else slap her. Whatever attracts her to pretending to be other people is clearly related to her own discomfort at being herself. In any case, what we're dealing with here is a highly agitated and restless personality. Nora isn't ready to forgive her father, and so she passes on his project, thinking this will be the last she hears of it. Instead, she learns indirectly that the film is moving forward with American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) in the lead. To Nora, this feels no less a betrayal than cheating on her mom would have been. Indeed, there's an element of seduction involved, as Trier reveals, pushing Nora to the background for a spell, while focusing on the way Gustav convinces Rachel to take the part, and then proceeds to manipulate her into playing it as Nora would. (Fanning interprets the role with total sincerity, when a shallow caricature might have better illustrated what an artistic compromise she represents.) Gustav can charm when he wants to, but is also armed with witheringly unfiltered judgments toward everyone. Scenes of Gustav and Rachel feeling their way through his script, interrogating the characters' motivations in rehearsal, encourage audiences to pose the same questions on the surrounding film. 'Sentimental Value' could hardly be called unclear, but it leaves ample room for ambiguity and personal interpretation. It also strikes a surprising tone, opening with Terry Callier's near-mystical folk track 'Dancin' Girl,' and sticking to the nostalgic sounds of an earlier generation (while also incorporating up-to-the-minute industry details, like Netflix). Skarsgård is such a great actor, it's tempting to see 'Sentimental Value' strictly as a father-daughter story — and Rachel's arrival as a symbolic attempt to replace Nora — though Trier and Vogt are actually focused elsewhere. Turns out, the more illuminating dynamic is the one between Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Gustav's departure all those years ago, coupled with their mother's illness, forced a certain responsibility upon Nora before she was ready to handle it, and now it's Agnes who's the one looking out for Nora. As it turns out, Gustav has pulled this kind of stunt before. Among his artistic principles, first and foremost is that he films with friends, preferring people he knows to professionals. When Agnes was a girl, he cast her in his most acclaimed film, an intense bonding experience that left her feeling abandoned when the projected ended and his attention went elsewhere. When Gustav asks to cast his grandson, Agnes' only child, she's quick to shoot down the idea. But she's the first to recognize how accepting the lead role might be therapeutic for Nora, who's started to spiral amid the pressures of their mother's death and father's return. To the extent that the Borg family home is a metaphor — with a none-too-subtle crack in its foundation — this one seems to be falling down around them. Maybe that's a good thing, the movie argues, suggesting a model by which making art is a means of making amends. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
