For months I wanted to watch Sentimental Value,
the Norwegian family drama (by auteur Joachim Trier) that won the Grand Prix at
Cannes and has just been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best
Picture. Though recently more and more foreign-language films have been
nominated for top Oscar honors, this film’s haul has been particularly
impressive, including Best Original Screenplay and four acting noms (for Renate
Reinsve as Best Actress, for both Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas as Best Supporting
Actress, and for screen veteran Stellan Skarsgård as Best Supporting Actor). Among the kudos already won by Sentimental Value is
recognition from AARP’s annual Movies for Grownups, which has its own unique
categories for films of special interest to older folk. AARP named Sentimental
Value the year’s “Best Intergenerational
Film.”
It’s easy to see why Seniors who appreciate art-films
might go for this one. No guns, no spilled guts, no things that go bump in the
night, unless you’re talking about painful memories. Just a quiet family drama,
involving two grown daughters, their estranged father, and several others
caught in the orbit of a Norwegian household whose members are prominent in the
European arts community. I have loved many Scandinavian films over the years,
starting with the masterpieces of Ingmar Bergman, and I suspected Sentimental
Value would be a pleasant change from recent highly lauded but deliberately
over-the-top American flicks like Sinners and One Battle After
Another.
Here’s what surprised me: when I watched on the
big-screen TV in my living room, Sentimental Value seemed almost too
low-key. Its characters’ struggles to bind old wounds struck me as convincing, but not always interesting. I
wanted something exciting to happen, beyond talky scenes in various quiet
locales—a bedroom, a café, a beach. The low-key conversations did
contrast in an interesting way with the theatricality built into the subject
matter. The father is a world-famous director; his #1 daughter Nora is an
acclaimed stage actress. At the start of the film, it’s opening night at a huge
and prestigious theatre, and Nora (dressed in a period gown that suggests she’s
playing an Ibsen heroine) is in a state of total panic. She’s absolutely
convinced that she can’t possibly play her role, and she does everything she
can think of—to the consternation of cast and crew—to avoid going on stage. Then,
finally, she does make her entrance . . . and the performance is a triumph.
So we know Nora is a self-centered neurotic, but it
remains to meet the rest of the family, This occurs after the funeral of Nora’s
mother, when friends and relatives gather at the historic family homestead. An
unexpected arrival is Nora and her sister’s estranged father, who long ago left
the family behind to pursue his directing ambitions. Now he’s back, at least
partly to further the new project with which he hopes to revitalize his career.
The script he’s written focuses on the final days of his own mother, who had
been an heroic anti-Nazi partisan in World War II. He wans to film in the
family home, and he wants Nora to step into his mother’s role. By the film’s
end, we understand everyone’s emotional connections, and see the possibility of
reconciliation. But it takes a long time to get there, and I confess I was a
bit confused by the off-screen characters (a mother, a grandmother) who are so
much responsible for these family members’ deeply-felt emotions.
I wonder: would I have liked this film better in the
cineplex? Do certain quiet, serious movies just not work as couch-films?
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