Film review

  • Sentimental Value

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Affeksjonsverdi

    Joachim Trier (2025)

    Sentimental Value gets off to a fine start.  The voice of an elderly woman (ninety-one-year-old Bente Børsum) explains that when Nora Borg was a child and her school class was asked to write a story told from an object’s point of view, Nora didn’t hesitate to choose the house she lived in.  The voiceover, in reassuring, once-upon-a-time tones, describes the childhood of Nora and her younger sister Agnes, as Joachim Trier’s camera moves inside the Borgs’ Oslo home and creates a montage of family memories, some happier than others – the two girls enjoying Christmas or startled by their parents’ marital discord.  This prologue, which also draws attention to a large crack in a wall of the house (a feature from when it was originally built), is an imaginative, economical introduction to what will remain the key location, and a real presence, throughout the story to come.  It’s followed by sequences in a theatre, where the adult Nora (Renate Reinsve), a successful actor, endures prolonged stage fright before delivering a powerful performance, enthusiastically received.  Her rampant nerves are alarming, her unorthodox means of overcoming them almost dizzying, and funny.  Nothing that follows in the remaining two hours of Sentimental Value quite matches the film’s first fifteen minutes but Trier’s Cannes Grand Prix winner, showing at the London Film Festival, is never less than absorbing.

    The prologue’s skew-whiff fairytale flavour resumes in the next scene, with an unexpected and, from the sisters’ point of view, unwelcome guest at an important gathering at the family home – not a princess’s christening but their mother’s funeral.  It’s their long-absent father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), from whom both his daughters are estranged, who puts in the surprise appearance.  Trier keeps the action strong and startling throughout this episode, too.  Nora and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) have themselves grown apart, but Nora gets on well with Agnes’ young son Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Lovend).  She’s just telling her little nephew how, as a child, she used to eavesdrop through the crack in the wall on grown-ups’ conversations, when she hears, through the crack, her father’s voice joking to another funeral guest, ‘I don’t know whether to offer my condolences or my congratulations’.  From its first appearance in the prologue, the family home’s foundational flaw is obviously symbolic, but you don’t mind when Trier exploits it in such an unstressed, incisive way as this.  Yet Gustav’s stunningly unkind remark is also a turning point in Sentimental Value.

    For a start, plenty of cineastes will have recognised it as a quote from another film.  In Love on the Run (1979), the last of François Truffaut’s five stories with Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel as protagonist, ‘I don’t know whether to offer my condolences or my congratulations’ is what a woman says to Antoine on learning of his divorce.  In giving these words to Gustav, Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt (who, as usual, shares the screenplay credit with him) not only illustrate the character’s insensitivity but indicate the world in which he has led his adult life and is most comfortable:  Gustav Borg is a film director – a famous one, though his best days are widely assumed to be behind him.  His main reason for attending the funeral is to renew contact with Nora for professional rather than paternal reasons.  As he explains at a subsequent meeting arranged with her, Gustav has just completed a screenplay that he hopes will be his ticket back to the big time.  As Nora knows well, her father loathes theatre and despises television, so he hasn’t seen much of her acting.  But he wants her to play the lead in his new picture.

    Gustav can hardly be termed a gatecrasher at his ex-wife’s funeral:  it emerges that he still owns the house.  Nora and Agnes had thought ownership transferred to their mother as part of the divorce settlement, and that they would now inherit the property.  They learn that the relevant paperwork was never completed, and the house still belongs to their father, whose family home it had been before he married.  Gustav’s new screenplay is autobiographical, and he intends to shoot his film, whose working title is also ‘Sentimental Value’, inside the house.  The main character will be Gustav’s mother, who committed suicide there when he was a boy.  His meeting with Nora doesn’t go well, though:  angered by her father’s self-preoccupation, she refuses the role.  Gustav goes to lick his wounds at a French film festival where a retrospective of his work is being shown.  Trier inserts an excerpt from one of Gustav’s films, a wartime drama in which two young children, a boy and a girl, are fleeing Nazi soldiers.  Only the girl succeeds in escaping; the excerpt ends with a long close-up of her beautiful face as she sits in the train carrying her, it seems, to safety.  The festival audience includes American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning).  A rising Hollywood star, she’s also a Gustav Borg fan and thrilled to meet him.

    From Gustav’s first encounter with Rachel Kemp, you can guess what’s going to happen in Sentimental Value:  Rachel will be cast in the role that Nora rejected; things will fall out so that Rachel eventually changes her mind; Nora will too, and play her late grandmother, in a spirit of reconciliation with her father; as a bonus, there’ll be a rapprochement between Nora and Agnes.  There are many pleasures to be had en route to this ending but Sentimental Value is essentially conventional; it’s more smoothly accomplished yet less exciting than Trier’s previous feature, The Worst Person in the World (2021).  The creative artist who mines his own experience for material and, in doing so, exploits the lives of family members, is hardly an original idea, though it’s realised here with particular immediacy thanks to Gustav’s insistence on filming in the house he knew as a child, then as a young husband and father.

    He’s not above making fraudulent use of the place and its furnishings to impress.  Conducting Rachel on a tour of the premises, Gustav shocks her by pointing out the very stool on which his mother stood to hang herself.  When he mentions this afterwards to Agnes, she says, ‘You mean that stool from IKEA?’  Agnes manages a rueful smile; her father shows greater relish of another of his tasteless jokes (though this one is pretty funny).  Trier has a knack for taking a cliché but not using it in the usual way.  Just before Gustav and Rachel arrive for the house tour, Nora and Agnes are looking over some of their mother’s possessions; Nora decides she’d like to take a vase – and we know what normally happens to those on screen.  Making a hasty exit as her father and Rachel arrive, Nora fumbles with the precious object, which looks set to break in double-quick time, but she somehow stops it falling and makes good her escape, clutching the still intact vase.  Although this made me smile, Trier’s avoiding the obvious tends to come through in that kind of detail, rather than in the larger storyline.

    I found myself resisting what I felt sure would be the outcome of Sentimental Value, not only because this seemed predictable (rather than inevitable:  a very different matter in dramatic terms) but also because I took against Gustav from an early stage.  Stellan Skarsgård has appeared on the screen before Nora hears her father’s voice through the crack in the wall; even so, Gustav’s cruel words are, in effect, a splendid entrance line for Skarsgård.  The more screen time he has as Gustav, the more fun he seemed to give plenty of the NFT1 audience, and the more uncomfortable I felt about the blurring of a crowd-pleasing performance and the infuriating yet supposedly irresistible character concerned.  The pleasure Skarsgård/Gustav gives a movie-literate audience is no doubt greater because Gustav is a creature of cinema:  grandpa’s present to Erik on his ninth birthday is two comically inappropriate DVDs, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (‘This is a film that will help you understand women,’ Gustav tells Erik).  It’s revealed that Gustav has been using his family for filmmaking purposes for decades, and he shows no signs of stopping.  The little girl escaping the Nazis was played by Agnes as a child, though it seems to be the only acting she has ever done:  she’s an academic historian, married to an accountant (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud).  Without asking Agnes or her husband first, Gustav now invites his grandson to play himself as a boy in the new film.

    When Agnes finds out, she is understandably irate.  In response, Gustav urges her to read his script.  Exasperated, she uncharacteristically raises her voice to tell him she doesn’t care how good the script is, a remark that made this viewer want to cheer.  When Agnes later capitulates and lets Erik appear in the film, it’s because she is as bowled over by the script as Gustav expected (she tells Nora the writing seems exceptionally heartfelt) – not because she doesn’t want to disappoint her son, who’s excited at the prospect of being in a movie.  That makes Agnes’ change of mind even more galling.  We get the message that art is the only kind of meaningful personal communication of which Gustav Borg is capable, but Trier seems to be asserting too that art is somehow transcendent, and can be a means of healing broken relationships.  Assertion is as far as Sentimental Value gets, though.  Gustav might be more easily forgivable if Trier were able to develop a stronger sense of the character’s stature as a film artist – but that single clip of the World War II drama is all that’s shown of his work and, except for the lingering close-up on Agnes, it’s not very remarkable.  The same goes, by the way, for Trier’s occasional flashbacks, showing (from whose point of view?) the persecution of Gustav’s mother (Vilde Søyland) by German soldiers in the Nazi occupation of Oslo in the early 1940s.

    Once Gustav and Rachel part company, he must undergo a major health scare before Nora reconsiders their relationship and his offer of that plum role.  After hovering between life and death for a while, Gustav recovers in hospital.  When, in a fruity tone of voice, the old rascal tells a nurse how nice it is to wake up to her pretty face, I must admit I wished he hadn’t woken up.  In Trier’s closing sequence, Nora and Erik are on set, playing the scene that will immediately precede her character’s suicide.  Right to the end, Trier makes things more plausible through variation on a movie trope.  There’s no all-is-forgiven embrace between Gustav and Nora.  Instead, after he has called cut on the take, they lock eyes; in both pairs of eyes, the emotions are hard to read.  Renate Reinsve was marvellous in The Worst Person in the World but she was almost bound to be a revelation there:  she’d appeared in Trier’s Oslo, August 31st (2011) but was still virtually unknown outside Norway.  Yet Reinsve is just as terrific in Sentimental Value, through the variety and subtlety of her playing.   She makes Nora truly unpredictable in that opening stage fright episode, not least when she asks her co-star, Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie), for a backstage quickie to help calm her down.  (Jakob refuses but it later emerges that he and Nora are having an affair, although Jakob is married.)  In the funeral sequences, Reinsve demonstrates Nora’s acting chops in real life:  she knows how to conceal her loathing of Gustav in a formal setting.   This contrasts strongly with her barely controlled fury at their next, tête-à-tête meeting.

    Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas’s Agnes is rarely demonstrative but always emotionally expressive; Lilleaas partners Reinsve beautifully throughout.  Elle Fanning’s role is fundamentally just as thankless as the one she was saddled with in last year’s A Complete Unknown but Fanning has richer dramatic opportunities in Sentimental Value and doesn’t waste them.  Apart from her and, in a small part, Cory Martin Smith, the cast is an extraordinary pan-Scandinavian collective:  Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Anders Danielsen Lie (good again here, though his role is minor compared with those he’s played in earlier Trier films) are Norwegian; Stellan Skarsgård is Swedish; Jesper Christensen is Danish.  Skarsgård, as well as conveying powerfully what makes his character tick, is especially impressive when, after Rachel’s departure, Gustav is wrecked and abject.  Yet the fleeting presence of the great Jesper Christensen, as a long-time collaborator of Gustav behind the camera, made me keenly aware that I would rather have seen much more of him and rather less of  Skarsgård.  I want to end on a positive, though (at this year’s LFF it doesn’t do to look a gift horse in the mouth).  The film’s title is excellent.  There’s a slight difference between the original Norwegian (‘the value of affection’) and the English version, but in both cases the title is apt and appealing.  What’s more, Joachim Trier, throughout the 133 minutes of Affeksjonsverdi/Sentimental Value, never stops exploring what it means.

    14 October 2025

     

     

  • After the Hunt

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Luca Guadagnino (2025)

    ‘It happened at Yale’, says the screen at the start, although it didn’t really – After the Hunt is a fiction concocted by the scenarist, Nora Garrett.  The setting is the Yale philosophy department, and that choice of discipline doesn’t bode well.  Philosophy epitomises exalted intellect and ivory towers:  it’s the go-to subject if you want to portray academics as (a) very brainy and (b) clueless in the real world – in other words, obviously.  Not herself an academic, Nora Garrett also assumes that, because her main characters are a professor, an assistant professor and a supposedly brilliant research student, they must always be super-articulate and use impressive words that assert their learning, even during heated arguments.  When the assistant professor is fired because the research student alleges that he sexually assaulted her, he turns on the professor who he feels has betrayed him.  (As well as colleagues, this pair have been lovers – from the professor’s point of view, an extra-marital affair.)  He yells that he thought he and the professor had ‘a common fealty’.  True, he also goes on to brand her a ‘fucking coward’ but only at the end of the same breath in which he has quoted Shakespeare – ‘Let innocence make false accusation blush, and tyranny tremble at patience’.

    The professor is Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), the assistant professor is Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) and the postgrad highflyer is Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri).  Hank’s guilt in the matter that generates most of the plot, isn’t taken as read just because he’s a white male in a position of some authority, and Maggie a much younger woman of colour.  After the Hunt is, rather, in the did-he-didn’t-he tradition of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (2008), in which prejudices surrounding, and consequences of, the pivotal event, are dramatically more important than the facts of what happened (or didn’t happen).  Doubt, set in a 1960s Catholic school and church community, emerged at a time when alleged cases of historical child abuse by Catholic priests were becoming a major public controversy.  Most of the action in Luca Guadagnino’s drama takes place in 2019, two years after the birth of #MeToo, which helped bring to light sexual misconduct in various kinds of workplace.  Showing at the London Film Festival just a few days before its general release in Britain, After the Hunt seems like an interesting idea.  Yet the film is a stinker.

    Alma and her psychotherapist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) host a soirée for her faculty colleagues and students – Maggie and Hank are among the guests.  He’s verbally provocative and handsy, especially towards Maggie.  She, in the bathroom and in search of a toilet roll, discovers an envelope concealed inside a cupboard, looks through the envelope’s contents and pockets a newspaper clipping.  Despite the palpable tensions between them throughout the party, Maggie agrees to Hank’s escorting her home.  She’s not in class next day but turns up at the Imhoffs’ that evening to announce that the previous night Hank invited himself into her apartment, where he raped her.  When Alma puts this to Hank, he vigorously denies the allegation, claiming Maggie invented it because he’d accused her of plagiarism in her thesis (whose subject is virtue ethics).  Neither Hank nor Maggie finds Alma sufficiently supportive of their positions.  When Alma reports what Maggie has claimed to the faculty dean (David Leiber), Hank immediately loses his job.  Maggie goes public with her allegations in the Yale student newspaper.

    As for that newspaper story in the bathroom cabinet:  Maggie translates it (from German) to discover that Alma, as a teenager (in Sweden), accused a family friend of rape, but later withdrew the accusation.  Maggie claims this is why Alma has been so tentative in supporting Maggie’s claims against Hank.  The rift between the professor and her star student climaxes in an outdoor, public showdown, in which Alma accuses materially privileged Maggie of manifold insincerity.  According to Alma, Maggie is not only a plagiarist (of Alma’s own research) but also pretends to have things in common with Alma by aping the latter’s dress; if that’s not enough, Maggie is engaging in a purely ‘performative’ relationship with Alex (Lío Mehiel), her non-binary partner.  In return, Maggie slaps Alma’s face.  Licking her wounds in her second home, a wharfside apartment, Alma finds Hank in bed there:  their affair is over, but he held on to the apartment keys.  They talk a bit, then kiss; when Hank tries to step things up into sex, Alma kicks him out.

    Next day, Alma is confronted on campus by a group of student demonstrators, led by Alex.  Alma has already done a fair amount of stomach-clutching and throwing up.  She now collapses and is rushed to hospital for treatment on a perforated stomach ulcer (time-honoured symbol of a guilty secret gnawing away inside someone, handier than cancer because it’s easier to recover from if treated promptly).  In her hospital bed, she tells Frederik the truth about her own sexual assault as a teenager – that she initiated the relationship with her father’s friend and accused him of rape when he ended the relationship.  The man in question committed suicide.  Therapist Frederik, who knows strikingly little about his wife’s traumatic history, points out that the man was nevertheless guilty of statutory rape.  Also seemingly unaware of Alma’s fling with Hank, Frederik tells his wife he loves her.

    That’s not all.  In a bizarre subplot, Alma, who’s friendly with Kim Sayers (Chloë Sevigny), the campus psychiatrist (there appears to be just the one), nicks a prescription form and forges Kim’s signature so that she (Alma) can get hold of medication she needs.  Until this comes to light, Alma was on the verge of getting tenure; her misconduct puts that on hold, it seems indefinitely.  After Alma’s stay in hospital, the action leaps forward five years.  Alma and Maggie meet for a drink, the first social contact they’ve had since the 2019 happenings.  They’ve both Moved On.  Maggie didn’t get her PhD and she split with Alex but she’s now happily engaged, to a woman.  Alma can beat that:  she published an article about her teenage rape and is now faculty dean!  Maggie says she doesn’t believe Alma is happy.  Alma says she doesn’t care what Maggie thinks.  Maggie exits.  Alma pays the drinks bill and prepares to leave.  You wonder why they bothered with this reunion at all, except to get the film over the line.  Off screen, the voice of Luca Guadagnino calls ‘Cut!’

    Giving himself the last word, Guadagnino may be saying he doesn’t care either:  the ‘Cut!’ is a roguish meta touch that also sounds like the director admitting he’s had enough of the garbage he’s served up.  Guadagnino has been notably prolific in recent years.  He made his first feature in 1999; his biggest success to date, Call Me by Your Name, released in 2017, was his fifth feature.  Since then, he’s made six more (one a documentary) and a seventh (starring Andrew Garfield) is currently in production.  I’ve never been a great fan of Guadagnino’s work but After the Hunt is so much worse than what’s gone before that you wonder if he’s currently doing too much to be able to concentrate fully on the project in hand.

    How Yale works, according to him and Nora Garrett, is full of surprises.  A few examples:

    • Hank isn’t suspended but instantly dismissed, even though it’s a one-person’s-word-against-another case, with no other evidence available to the authorities;
    • Said authorities don’t apparently involve the police, even though Maggie’s allegations of rape are a matter of public record – not just in her newspaper interview but also thanks to the noisy dispute between Alma and Hank that can’t fail to be heard by a class of students;
    • The dean calls an urgent faculty meeting to discuss the Maggie situation – no suggestion there’ve been any prior meetings about it.  At the end, the dean asks Alma to stay behind as if she were a primary school pupil, this also within earshot of all the other staff present.

    When her tenure is paused, Alma says she always knew ‘the rotten side’ of her would be her undoing, before she achieved her academic ambitions.  She muses about this as if her professional downfall is caused by a kind of mystical inevitability rather than a concrete reason:  what did she expect forging a colleague’s signature on a medical prescription?  Call-me-old-fashioned but I was amazed that in 2019 some of Alma’s other students didn’t report her for abusive language in a seminar:  for her every mention of a famous philosophical name – Adorno, Arendt (Nora Garrett clearly going through the alphabet) – Alma directs at least a couple of angry ‘fuckings’ at one or more of the students in the seminar.  (This is almost a Garrett trademark – same idea as Hank’s ‘fucking coward’ after the quote from The Winter’s Tale:  a facile, phony way of making things savagely ‘real’.)

    It’s important to the story that what happened between Hank and Maggie after the party isn’t cut and dried, but the film is much more evasive than that.  By giving Alma her grim backstory, After the Hunt dodges the issue of how someone in her professional position, if she hadn’t had skin in the game, might have dealt with the situation created by Maggie’s allegations.  Because Maggie is, in various ways, exposed as a fraud, the film feels able virtually to ignore the question of whether she actually believes what she claims about Hank.  Didn’t Guadagnino realise that Nora Garrett’s screenplay was merely playing with cultural controversies, or didn’t it bother him?

    Despite mainly negative press for the film since it premiered at Venice a few weeks ago, plenty of reviews have praised Julia Roberts for ‘a career-defining performance’, and so on.  Not for the first time, a deservedly popular star is lauded for being cast against type – or, in this case, simply miscast.  Roberts gamely tries to give the impression that the florid sentences she speaks come naturally to her character; she does this, when Alma isn’t shouting, by drawling her lines and draining them of vocal colour.  With the help of the make-up team, she is physically transformed to look washed out – that is, to look not like Julia Roberts:  here too, her portrait of Alma is no more than self-effacement.  No actor alive could have made a silk purse out of the sow’s ear of Nora Garrett’s script but someone like Tilda Swinton, with whom Guadagnino has worked several times, would have suggested in her natural presence and the kind of intelligence she can project, a person of intellectual authority.  Julia Roberts doesn’t have authority of any kind in this role, which undermines the drama of Alma’s increasing loss of control.  Andrew Garfield doesn’t compensate.  Now in his early forties, Garfield remains a stubbornly boyish figure, a quality that dilutes the age and power difference between Maggie and Hank, and which makes him callow from the start.  Spouting Garrett’s purple prose, Garfield’s Hank comes across like a showoff student himself.  Ayo Edebiri treats her lines with too much respect:  she seems to be thinking how she should deliver them as she speaks.

    After the Hunt opens with a loud, ominous tick-tock, repeated a couple more times during the film.  The ticking so draws attention to itself that I thought at first it must mean something – a reminder maybe that, as #MeToo was gathering momentum, so too was the related Time’s Up initiative?  On reflection, I doubt this time-bomb effect is anything but that – an effect.  It’s upstaged anyway by other sonic features.  At the opening party, the ambient noise of chattering guests off screen so competes with the voices of the characters on camera, that I thought people in the Royal Festival Hall auditorium were carrying on a conversation.  Later, Frederik plays classical music deafeningly loud to make a point to Alma, but she’s lucky compared with the film’s audience, which must put up with for much longer Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ intrusively dissonant score.  The people involved in After the Hunt surely hoped that, with its star names and juicy scenario, they were making an awards contender, but the film, as well as being critically panned, is faring poorly at the box office.  The only superlative it merits is most annoying soundtrack of the year.

    13 October 2025

     

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