Here is an exuberant, garrulous, self-aware picture about an ageing and egomaniac film director and his two grownup daughters; it comes from Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier, who gave Cannes themarvellous romantic drama The Worst Person in the World in 2021, starring the award-winning Renate Reinsve, who stars in this one as well. The film cycles through a range of moods and ideas, and finally delivers a fair bit of that sentimentality from the title; it’s a movie of daddy issues and cinematic adventures in the manner of Fellini and Bergman, with a gag about overhearing a therapist’s session through the heating pipes, pinched from Woody Allen’s Another Woman.
Stellan Skarsgård plays preening auteur Gustav Borg, whose career is on the slide; many years ago he left his wife, Sissel, a psychotherapist, and two grownup daughters, abandoning the family home – the house where Gustav himself was brought up. Now their mother has died and Gustav’s daughter Nora (Reinsve), a famous stage actor starring in a production of A Doll’s House, is suffering anxiety attacks – and to snap out of it, she asks to be slapped backstage by the (married) actor with whom she is having an affair, played by longtime Trier player Anders Danielsen Lie.
Nora’s sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) is a little calmer and more grounded, being happily settled with husband and young son, though a little messed up by the memory of having once had a small child-actor role in one of Gustav’s films – and feeling abandoned once the filming was over. Just as the two women are sorting through the house’s contents for things of sentimental value they might want to keep before selling the house, they are stunned to realise that the insufferable Gustav actually still has legal rights to the property and now wants to use it as a location for a biopic about his mother, who took her own life there due to the trauma of being tortured by the Nazis during the war.
To add insult to injury, Gustav begs Nora to take the lead role of her own grandmother, expecting that Nora, whom he neglected for most of her life, will use her stage fame to revive his flagging career. He even asks Agnes to let him use her young son as a child-actor, just as she once was used. But after Nora angrily refuses, the part is taken by Hollywood superstar Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) who has fallen for Gustav’s rascally charm at a film festival and brings with her huge amounts of investment funding. So Nora gets to be jealous and upset all over again.
The stage appears to be set for an uproarious but bittersweet black comedy of the movie world and show business and the emotional vampirism and ruthlessness it involves, with a touch of All About Eve perhaps – made worse when you are working with members of your own family. And to some extent, that is what we get. But this long and slightly indulgent film also ranges across moods of rather serious wintriness and cinephile sadness about the changing industry. Gustav had insisted on using a veteran cinematographer with whom he’d worked many times, but realises he’s going to have to rescind the offer when he sees how decrepit the poor guy now is.
There are also cinephile in-jokes (which are also Cannesphile in-jokes). When Agnes’s son has his tenth birthday, Gustav brings the poor boy an outrageously unsuitable present: some brand new DVDs of horribly shocking films like Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible – but Trier shows the ultimate irony is that they don’t have a DVD player. Technological changes have robbed these films of the power to shock.
We are of course heading for an emollient ending in which Gustav’s very real talent is to be acknowledged along with his muddled, flawed, old-guy affection for his daughters – and maybe Trier himself is now not above a bit of fictional ancestor-worship appropriate to his own high status. It’s a baggy comedy, sentimental in ways that are not entirely intentional effect, but there is value too.
Sentimental Value screened at the Cannes film festival