Meta is all the rage these days in films about filmmakers and the filmmaking process. Take Richard Linklater’s ode to the French New Wave, “Nouvelle Vague” (available on Netflix), which follows a young Jean-Luc Godard in 1959 Paris seeking to make his first film (“Breathless”), or “Jay Kelly” from Noah Baumbach (“White Noise,” “Squid and the Whale”), in which George Clooney essentially plays George Clooney. Add to that Joachim Trier’s stirring “Sentimental Value,” about the creative tempest of filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), an auteur well into his autumn seeking to achieve one last cinematic masterpiece.
There’s not an ounce of fat in the script, the performances are tight and lived-in and Trier, hailed for his edgy, dramatic simmers “The Worst Person in the World” (2021) and “Oslo, August 31st” (2011), again proves masterful in presenting a slow, ever-mounting, emotionalism, a devilish dark humor and a climax of melancholy and rue. The movie gets to you from the inside out.
As much as Skarsgård’s Gustav is the catalyst for all that happens, it’s the feminine side of the house of Borg that gives “Sentimental Value” its heart and humanity. We begin with Gustav’s daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve), having a panic attack during an opera performance. Her mother has just passed away and she and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), are trying to decide what to do with the cozy grand bungalow on the outskirts of Oslo that they grew up in, when dad, long divorced from mom and largely absent during their rearing years, drops by. Turns out mom was supposed to have gotten the house in the settlement but the paperwork never went through, so Gustav still holds the deed to his childhood home where his mother, imprisoned for her part in the resistance during World War II, committed suicide.
The house, as you might guess, is a central character of the film. Gustav plops down a script about familial bonds, depression and the past roiling up in the present. He professes it’s inspired by Nora, though the events in the story mirror the arc of his mother’s turbulent life. With pleading eyes, he tells Nora he wants her to play the lead. It’s presented as an olive branch to reconnect the two, but it’s here the tenuous nature of their relationship becomes painfully clear: Nora refuses to read the script and declines the part – and not just because of the sins of the past, but because she doesn’t believe she and her father can see eye to eye creatively. There’s no screaming or shouting, just a simple “no” that lingers coldly.
Vestiges of Bergman and Herzog feel warmly imbued in Gustav, though Skarsgård, deep into the part, makes him wholly his own. At a French film festival honoring Gustav, we get a scene from one of the director’s heralded earlier works in which two young children streak through a golden, glowing cornfield. At first, it seems innocent and playful. Then a Nazi patrol rolls up and gives pursuit. Trying to make a nearby train – ostensibly a vessel to freedom – the boy falls while the girl, aboard the train, looks back in terror with the camera lingering long on her heaving face. It’s an incredible performance. It’s a scene too, that we are dropped into without context or orientation before the action flips to a film panel with Gustav at center and a rapt audience awaiting his words. It’s a brilliant modulation of our perception. The young actress who captivates us so thoroughly turns out to be Gustav’s younger daughter, Agnes. We learn that’s pretty much all the acting she did, while Nora has blossomed on the performing stage, a medium her father begrudgingly grants a passing respect. Agnes now works as a historical researcher, helping Gustav occasionally on projects, and is married with a 9-year-old son (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven). She and Nora live near each other and the family house where Gustav has designs to shoot the film and has set up camp to incubate the project.
It’s at the French fete that Gustav meets Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning, who you can catch on the screen next door in a slightly different feature, “Predator: Badlands”), a renowned U.S. actor akin to a Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Stewart or – since we’re going meta – Elle Fanning. She’s deeply impressed by his opus, and after the two share admirations throughout a long night of champagne and revelry, Rachel agrees to take the lead in Gustav’s burgeoning endeavor. To make it work, Gustave flips the script from Norwegian to English. Slow-burning complications ensue.
One of the more revealing scenes arrives when Rachel spends an afternoon with Nora for research purposes. Nora doesn’t hold back about Gustav or her childhood. There’s nothing mean-spirited or vengeful about it, but you can sense a shifting within Rachel. The true pulse of the film, however, is the sisterhood between Nora and Agnes. Their quiet moments together when they delve into Nora’s depression and the scars of their father’s on-again, off-again attentions convey volumes in scant words and flickers of suppressed emotion. Reinsve, so impressive in Trier’s “Worst Person” and more so as the single mother of a boy accused of sex abuse in “Armand” (2024), delivers the same muted intensity here, using her soft, soulful eyes as her main means of projection. That said, it’s Ibsdotter Lilleaas who anchors their scenes. Her Agnes is the more rational when it comes to family matters, though she too bears the weight of the past. It’s from her more reflective and contemplative point of view that history of the Borgs begins to take form.
Trier’s use of camera-within-camera framing is masterful. That Nazi chase scene for one, but more whimsically, the jokey cellphone videos made by Gustav and Agnes’ son. Then there’s a deeply affecting end scene I will say no more about. It’s not Trier’s only use of perspective blinders; there are cuts in time and place too without announcement or warning, but they all make sense. It’s deft editing that asks of the audience, and the reward is well worth it.
As to the title, which reads like a thin platitude, it’s articulated during the process of the sisters sorting through their mother’s belongings and expands from there. How Trier pulls the splaying story together feels virtuosic, but there’s nothing showy or needlessly sentimental. It’s muted, dour and throughly affecting. It’s filmmaking from the heart.
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