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
