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CairoScene
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Review: Joachim Trier's Most Emotionally Mature Film Yet
Review: Joachim Trier's Most Emotionally Mature Film Yet 'Sentimental Value' is directed by the acclaimed Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier. Trier is best known for introspective and emotionally resonant films like Oslo, August 31st and The Worst Person in the World. The latter earned two Academy Award nominations, including Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay. With this latest feature, Trier seems to channel the emotional precision of Ingmar Bergman. This very well might be his most mature and accomplished film to date. 'Sentimental Value' screened in the main competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. By the time this review gets posted, the winners will have been announced. If it were up to me, this film would win the Palme d'Or. There's a sense in this film that Trier has elevated his craft as a director. His work now reflects not only technical mastery but also a deeper philosophical engagement with his characters and their inner lives. Much like Bergman in films like Scenes from a Marriage, Trier employs a narrator who verbalises the inner states of his characters with startling clarity. Emotions aren't simply identified. They're evoked through vivid metaphors that draw us deeper into the character's interior world. In the opening scene, the narrator recalls how, as a child, the protagonist was asked to choose an object and describe how it felt. She chose her house. She describes how the house hated being empty. How it went through long periods of silence. It hated that feeling. This silence, of course, was due to the absence of a family member. The way the narrator describes the house's emotional state mirrors the void left behind by a family that was on the verge of collapse. When its rooms weren't filled with footsteps or laughter, it felt empty, just like her. From that very first scene, you understand the emotional architecture of the entire family. The writing is devastating. It's a great example of how good narration with vivid descriptive imagery can be a vessel for emotional truth. Co-written with his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt, the film explores how past wounds shape the present. It's a deeply personal drama that reveals how the stories we tell can become a way of coping and understanding the pain we inherit. The story revolves around Nora Berg (Renate Reinsve), a stage actress grappling with the recent loss of her mother. Her estranged father, Gustav Berg played by Stellan Skarsgård in a powerhouse performance, resurfaces with an unexpected offer. He wants her to play the lead in his new comeback film. The project is clearly autobiographical. Nora refuses. She can't seem to forgive her father for his past mistakes. When she turns him down, Gustav casts a rising Hollywood star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), in her place. In this role, Fanning displays an impressive range of emotions. Of course, it is not long before she realises that she's is portraying a version of Nora shaped by the director's own memories. What follows is a delicate meditation on the fragile ways art can both reopen wounds and begin to mend them. 'Sentimental Value' is a film about the redemptive power of storytelling. It explores how the act of making cinema can be a form of healing. How re-enacting the traumas of the past can offer a new way of seeing, of understanding, of letting go. In revisiting pain through performance, characters don't just relive their memories. They begin to reshape them. Trier suggests that we might not be able to escape our past. However, through the expression of art, we might just learn how to live with the pain. 'Sentimental Value' is filled with emotional honesty. It's a reminder of why we turn to cinema in the first place. It's to make sense of the world. Great films help us understand why we feel the way we do. They offer a kind of clarity that life often withholds. In doing so, films like this one help us come to terms with the people we love. Not as we wish they were, but as they truly are, flawed and deeply complex. 'Sentimental Value' will almost certainly find itself in the awards conversation by year's end. I loved everything about it.
Vogue Singapore
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue Singapore
Cannes hit Sentimental Value might be the best film you see all year
Kasper Tuxen Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World , the Norwegian auteur's portrait of millennial ennui starring the captivating Renate Reinsve, remains one of the best films of our present decade—a touchingly tender, incredibly funny and deeply moving coming-of-age saga which rightly earned its leading lady Cannes' Best Actress prize in 2021. That year, Spike Lee's jury chose to award the Palme d'Or to Julia Ducournau's Titane instead—fair enough—but if Trier doesn't win this time around, for Sentimental Value , his hotly-anticipated reunion with Reinsve and fellow frequent collaborator Anders Danielsen Lie, then I will really, truly, be outraged. In some ways, Sentimental Value is a spiritual sequel to Worst Person— while the latter observed dating, daddy issues and a woman's preparedness (or lack thereof) to be a parent in her turbulent late 20s and early 30s, this new release picks up very slightly later, in a more settled portion of one's third decade, in which, say, your career may have taken off but you're still no closer to building the kind of family so many of your peers now seem to have. It's poignant, poetic, frequently surprising and quietly devastating. And much like its predecessor, it left me paralysed in my seat as the credit rolled, crying tears of joy and reconsidering my whole life. It's the story of two sisters, Nora and Agnes (Reinsve opposite the enchanting Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), their estranged father, Gustav (a wonderfully prickly Stellan Skarsgård), their dearly departed mother and the entire clan which predates them, but it's also the historical account of a house: the sprawling, creaky, red-fronted, Oslo relic, with giant cracks in its foundations and secret passageways within it, which they have occupied for generations. Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in Sentimental Value. Kasper Tuxen It's a living, breathing thing which, early in the film, bears witness to their latest tragedy: the loss of a matriarch, which hollows out this home, and creates space for the swaggering Gustav to re-enter it. Nora and Agnes couldn't be more different—the former, our lead, is a celebrated actor, effervescent, flighty, reckless, chronically single and prone to bouts of acute stage fright; the latter a soft-spoken historian with a husband and young son—but they both have difficult relationships with their father. A prolific filmmaker who left them when they were kids, he only really reappeared if he wanted something—and that's still the case now. He has written a script for a new project, he tells Nora, his first in over a decade, and more personal than anything he's ever attempted before—and he'd like her to play the lead, a part that is based on her own life. She's outraged, and stresses that they could never work together, and so he reluctantly shelves the movie—until, a fateful trip to the Venice Film Festival leads to him crossing paths with Rachel (a luminous Elle Fanning), a movie star on the hunt for a new challenge. Before Nora knows it, Rachel has dyed her hair dark brown, adopted a Norwegian accent and begun rehearsals in their childhood home. What follows is a film about the process of making a movie, and also of choosing not to make one. Nora continues acting on stage, having an affair with her married colleague (Anders Danielsen Lie, in a brief but effective part, with the pair's chemistry still unmatched) and ponders her father's motivations. All the while, the 70-year-old Gustav assembles his team, reckons with the notion of his own mortality and sets about nailing his film's ending, a sequence in which his protagonist hangs herself, in the very same room where Gustav's real-life mother committed the same act when he was a child. Is this film about Nora? Is it actually about Gustav's mother? Is it, in fact, about Gustav himself? And what exactly is he trying to do in making it? What is he trying to fix? What wound is he trying to close? Rachel tells him that she doesn't understand her character's thought process—why would she do this when she, in this story, has a young son? Gustav doesn't seem to know either—but he knows it can happen, because it happened to him.
Local Norway
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Local Norway
'It was my destiny': Norway director on Cannes runner-up prize
"Sentimental Value", his moving story about a quietly fractured Norwegian family with Elle Fanning got an extraordinary 19-minute standing ovation when its Cannes premiere ended in the early hours of Thursday morning. Even the director found himself crying behind the camera as he shot it, he told AFP. "It sounds cheesy, but I wept a lot making this film because I was so moved by the actors," he said of his cast, which play members of an arty family in Oslo who struggle to communicate. "The actors are my friends. I know that they were being halfway a character and halfway themselves. And that they were also dealing with stuff," said the maker of "The Worst Person in the World". That film landed the Norwegian two Oscar nominations and won then-newcomer Renate Reinsve the best actress award at Cannes in 2021. Many critics said it also should have won the Palme d'Or top prize. And many thought Trier should have won it again Saturday, with some calling "Sentimental Value" a contender for best film of the year. "I think it was my destiny to win the Grand Prix," a rueful Trier told reporters afterwards -- a reference to the failing fictional director portrayed in the film, who had also won the same prize in 1998. "I am almost as good as him now," Trier joked. Advertisement Fanning said "The Worst Person in the World" -- which brought Trier to her attention -- is "easily one of the best films in the last decade or even longer. It is just perfect," she told AFP. It was the last film in his "Oslo Trilogy" of intelligent, bittersweet explorations of life in the Norwegian capital. 'Crying and crying' Trier is famous for the rapport he builds with his actors. "We were a family too," he told AFP of the shoot for "Sentimental Value", rehearsing his script around the kitchen table of the beautiful old wooden home in Oslo where the film was shot, itself a character in the story. The heads that keep butting in Trier's on-screen family are the absent father, an arthouse filmmaker who has long been put out to grass, played by Swedish legend Stellan Skarsgård, and his stage actress daughter (Reinsve). "I think a lot of families carry woundedness and grief," Trier said. "And talk often doesn't help. It gets argumentative. We get stuck in our positions, the roles we give each other unconsciously." Advertisement The bad old dynamics are changed by the arrival of an American star -- Fanning playing someone only millimetres from her real self -- a fan of the father. She comes bearing lots of Netflix dollars to revive one of his long-stalled scripts. "We don't get too many Hollywood stars wanting to be in small Norwegian-language films," Trier joked of Fanning's interest in his films. "When Joachim sent me the script, I read it and I was just crying and crying by the final page," Fanning told AFP. "It is so emotional. It's a very personal piece for Joachim and you can just feel that rawness in it." Trier 'magic' The director comes from a family steeped in the Scandinavian film industry. He dedicated his Grand Prix at Cannes to his grandfather, Erik Lochen, a member of the Norwegian resistance during World War II. "He was captured and his way to survive after the war was to play jazz and to make films," Trier said. Lochen's film "The Hunt" also competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, in 1960. It didn't win either. It was beaten by a film called "La Dolce Vita". Trier admitted that that history, which is alluded to in his new movie, made it all very "meta". "You're making a film about a family with your filmmaking family. And you've got a meta Hollywood star," he said. But there are not that many parallels with his biological family. "It's not like I'm throwing anyone under the bus. My whole family has actually seen the film and are very supportive," he said. The filmmaker father, he insisted, is a mash-up of great auteurs such as Ingmar Bergman, Krzysztof Kieslowski and John Cassavetes. The "magic" that Fanning said Trier creates on set comes from taking your time, he told AFP, taking on the big themes with a light, humorous touch. "Anyone who's had experience of therapy -- and I have -- will know that it's about the silences and letting things arrive. Very often (that) is also the case with actors," said Trier. "We had quite a few moments like that in the film actually. Renate would look at me and I look at her and I say, 'What was that? That was interesting.' And we don't talk about it anymore. "But when people see it in editing, they go, 'Wow!'"
France 24
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
Norway's Trier is bridesmaid again at Cannes
"Sentimental Value", his moving story about a quietly fractured Norwegian family with Elle Fanning got an extraordinary 19-minute standing ovation when its Cannes premiere ended in the early hours of Thursday morning. Even the director found himself crying behind the camera as he shot it, he told AFP. "It sounds cheesy, but I wept a lot making this film because I was so moved by the actors," he said of his cast, which play members of an arty family in Oslo who struggle to communicate. "The actors are my friends. I know that they were being halfway a character and halfway themselves. And that they were also dealing with stuff," said the maker of "The Worst Person in the World". That film landed the Norwegian two Oscar nominations and won then-newcomer Renate Reinsve the best actress award at Cannes in 2021. Many critics said it also should have won the Palme d'Or top prize. And many thought Trier should have won it again Saturday, with some calling "Sentimental Value" a contender for best film of the year. "I think I was my destiny to win the Grand Prix," a rueful Trier told reporters afterwards -- a reference to the failing fictional director portrayed in the film, who had also won the same prize in 1998. "I am almost as good as him now," Trier joked. Fanning said "The Worst Person in the World" -- which brought Trier to her attention -- is "easily one of the best films in the last decade or even longer. It is just perfect," she told AFP. It was the last film in his "Oslo Trilogy" of intelligent, bittersweet explorations of life in the Norwegian capital. 'Crying and crying' Trier is famous for the rapport he builds with his actors. "We were a family too," he told AFP of the shoot for "Sentimental Value", rehearsing his script around the kitchen table of the beautiful old wooden home in Oslo where the film was shot, itself a character in the story. The heads that keep butting in Trier's on-screen family are the absent father, an arthouse filmmaker who has long been put out to grass, played by Swedish legend Stellan Skarsgard, and his stage actress daughter (Reinsve). "I think a lot of families carry woundedness and grief," Trier said. "And talk often doesn't help. It gets argumentative. We get stuck in our positions, the roles we give each other unconsciously." The bad old dynamics are changed by the arrival of an American star -- Fanning playing someone only millimetres from her real self -- a fan of the father. She comes bearing lots of Netflix dollars to revive one of his long-stalled scripts. "We don't get too many Hollywood stars wanting to be in small Norwegian-language films," Trier joked of Fanning's interest in his films. "When Joachim sent me the script, I read it and I was just crying and crying by the final page," Fanning told AFP. "It is so emotional. It's a very personal piece for Joachim and you can just feel that rawness in it." Trier 'magic' The director comes from a family steeped in the Scandinavian film industry. He dedicated his Grand Prix at Cannes to his grandfather, Erik Lochen, a member of the Norwegian resistance during World War II. "He was captured and his way to survive after the war was to play jazz and to make films," Trier said. Lochen's film "The Hunt" also competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, in 1960. It didn't win either. It was beaten by a film called "La Dolce Vita". Trier admitted that that history, which is alluded to in his new movie, made it all very "meta". "You're making a film about a family with your filmmaking family. And you've got a meta Hollywood star," he said. But there are not that many parallels with his biological family. "It's not like I'm throwing anyone under the bus. My whole family has actually seen the film and are very supportive," he said. The filmmaker father, he insisted, is a mash-up of great auteurs such as Ingmar Bergman, Krzysztof Kieslowski and John Cassavetes. The "magic" that Fanning said Trier creates on set comes from taking your time, he told AFP, taking on the big themes with a light, humorous touch. "Anyone who's had experience of therapy -- and I have -- will know that it's about the silences and letting things arrive. Very often (that) is also the case with actors," said Trier. "We had quite a few moments like that in the film actually. Renate would look at me and I look at her and I say, 'What was that? That was interesting.' And we don't talk about it anymore.
Kuwait Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Kuwait Times
Norway film starring Elle Fanning gets 19-minute Cannes ovation
Director Joachim Trier found himself crying behind the camera as he shot 'Sentimental Value', his moving new tale about a quietly fractured family that got an extraordinary 19-minute standing ovation Thursday at the end of its premiere at the Cannes film festival. 'It sounds cheesy,' he said, 'but I wept a lot making this film because I was so moved by the actors' playing members of an arty family in Oslo who cannot talk to each other despite all their supposed sophistication. 'The actors are my friends. I know that they were being halfway a character and halfway themselves. And that they were also dealing with stuff,' said the maker of 'The Worst Person in the World', which landed the Norwegian two Oscar nominations and won newcomer Renate Reinsve the best actress award at Cannes in 2021. Many critics that year said it also should have won the Palme d'Or top prize. 'We were a family too,' said Trier, rehearsing his script around the kitchen table of the beautiful old wooden home in Oslo where the film was shot, itself a character in the film. The heads that keep butting in Trier's on-screen family are the absent father, an arthouse filmmaker who has long been put out to grass, played by Swedish legend Stellan Skarsgard, and his stage actress daughter (Reinsve). 'I think a lot of families carry woundedness and grief,' Trier said. 'And talk often doesn't help. It gets argumentative. We get stuck in our positions, the roles we give each other unconsciously.' US actress Elle Fanning arrives for the screening of the film "Affeksjonsverdi" (Sentimental Value). Norwegian director and screenwriter Joachim Trier poses during a photocall for the film "Affeksjonsverdi" (Sentimental Value). Elle Fanning a 'mensch' The bad old dynamics are changed by the arrival of a Hollywood star—Elle Fanning playing someone only millimeters from her real self—a fan of the father, who comes bearing lots of Netflix dollars to revive one of his long-stalled scripts. 'We don't get too many Hollywood stars wanting to be in small Norwegian-language films,' Trier joked. But just like her character in the film, Fanning got the part through complete fandom, flying to Oslo between shooting the Bob Dylan biopic, 'A Complete Unknown', and the new 'Predator' in New Zealand. 'I am a massive fan' of Trier, she told AFP in Cannes, where the film is in the running for the Palme d'Or. 'I think 'The Worst Person in the World' is easily one of the best films in the last decade or even longer. It is just perfect.' 'When Joachim sent me the script I read it and I was just crying and crying by the final page. It is so emotional,' Fanning added. 'It's a very personal piece for Joachim and you can just feel that rawness in it.' Trier—who comes from a family steeped in the Scandinavian film industry—admitted it is all very 'meta. You're making a film about a family with your filmmaking family. And you've got a meta Hollywood star.' But they are not that many parallels with his biological family. 'It's not like I'm throwing anyone under the bus. My whole family has actually seen the film and are very supportive,' he said. The filmmaker father, he insisted, is a mash-up of great auteurs such as Ingmar Bergman, Krzysztof Kieslowski and John Cassavetes. Trier, 51, is famous for the bond he builds with his actors and he praised Fanning as the latest member of the family. 'She is a real mensch—a really kind and collaborative, cool person,' he said. Trier 'magic' The 'magic' that Fanning said Trier creates on set comes from taking your time, he told AFP, taking on the big themes with a light, humorous touch. 'Anyone who's had experience of therapy—and I have—will know that it's about the silences and letting things arrive. Very often is also the case with actors,' said Trier. 'We had quite a few moments like that in the film actually. Renate would look at me and I look at her and I say, 'What was that? That was interesting.' And we don't talk about it anymore. 'But when people see it in editing, they go, 'Wow!' That was also the reaction of most critics at Cannes, with The Hollywood Reporter calling it 'exquisite' and Vanity Fair saying it was 'gorgeous and gripping'.' Deadline's Pete Hammond said 'Sentimental Value' 'sneaks up on you... and has one of more satisfying endings I have seen in some time, perfectly pitched and worth the wait for its human truth.' — AFP
