Sentimental Value –Home Is Where the Heart Is
The multiple Academy Award -winning film, Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier, opens in Oslo. In their beautiful airy home, sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), are grieving over the death of their beloved mother. They are distressed by the return of their long-estranged father, Gustav ( Stellan Skarsgård), whom they haven’t seen for over thirty years, . The family home goes back for generations. Nora believes their house knows all the family secrets and lies. If only walls could talk!
At the post-funeral gathering, the sisters overhear their father trashing their mother. The tense, complicated relationship between their father, an aging but renowned film director, and his two daughters becomes the heart of the story.
Nora, the older daughter, is a highly gifted but relatively obscure theater actress with near-phobic stage fright. Her younger sister, Agnes, starred in one of her father’s classic films when she was five years old and is now a historian of film. They learn that their mother, a well-regarded psychotherapist, was too busy with her practice to finalize the divorce and property settlement necessary to record the transfer of home ownership. And Gustav has no interest in transferring his ownership to his daughters. Nonetheless he offers Nora the leading role in his upcoming film. He has hope that it will be his masterpiece and legacy.
When Nora adamantly declines, Gustav offers the role to A-lister American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who adores his critically acclaimed past work. Rachel tries heroically to fulfill the role he has given her, but the more she witnesses the family dynamics of his semi-biographical project, the more she has doubts she should play the main role.
Sentimental Value is essentially a family saga about what we know of each other and what we don’t. Nora and Rachel know almost nothing about their father’s life aside from his womanizing and abandonment of their mother. Gustav is full of sorrow and unexpressed tenderness for a loss of any meaningful relationship with his two daughters. Grappling with mistakes from his past, he doesn’t know how to redeem himself.
The awards for this film can be justified by the memorable performances of all four main cast members. However, the story doesn’t flow with the rhythm necessary to understand what the four characters share and what they cannot comprehend or communicate to each other. Although Nora, Rachel and Gustav seem to have found their psychic home, they are somehow still caged.
Availability: Hulu