Sentimental Value: A Nordic family feud and the spaces inbetween

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value has us caught up in a Norwegian family feud. Sisters Nora and Agnes Borg are visited by their estranged film-maker father, Gustav, who wants to cast Nora in his latest movie, shot in their family home. Bohemian, nostalgic and laced with sarcasm, it nears pretention. Yet it teeters willingly, before slapping us in the face. By the end credits, Trier’s Nordic realism left one undergraduate sobbing to the tune of Labi Siffre’s ‘Cannock Chase’.

Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, is the typical absentee father. The virus responsible for his eldest daughter Nora’s emotional troubles, a man imbedded within the myth of himself: the great director. Fallen and aged, with one final masterpiece to add to his catalogue, for much of the film he is a drifter. He appears at his ex-wife’s wake, as we see him first through his daughters’ eyes, a stranger. Then at the beach in Cannes, champagne on his dinner jacket, sun rising behind him.

Gustav invites as much intrigue as he does anger, as much scruffy adoration as disdain in the face of cantankerousness

Trier cannot resist pulling us into conflict. The same conflict occupying the Borg sisters. Gustav invites as much intrigue as he does anger, as much scruffy adoration as disdain in the face of cantankerousness. Does he return for his daughters or for himself? Is his new project – a film about his mother – an attempt to flog his own life story, or something else? To me, it is an effort to produce a nevertheless distorted act of love in the only way he knows how: through film.

As for Nora and Agnes, their lives reflect the remnants of their pollutant father. Nora falls into stage acting, and Agnes is forever seen as the little girl who played an evacuee in her father’s war film. They are products of their own father’s ghosts, as much sentimental heirlooms as the furniture in the old house, passive responders to Gustav’s arrival. And yet Trier moves us beyond the initial portrayal of the pair. Agnes investigates Norwegian Historical archives, in an effort to understand the complexities of her father, and Nora becomes distant, dark eyed and reclusive.

Renate Reinsve, who plays Nora, is a face I had recognised before. Appearing in each of Joachim Trier’s ‘Oslo Trilogy’ films, she acts as the arbiter of his latest – emotionally and visually. As her character dissolves into depression, we may query the effect of this. Does Trier latch on to a dull cliché, a woman driven to the edges of her mind by her father, hanging on to her girlish resentment? Her increasing fragility mirrors the deep and widening crack in the family home. It sprawls from the foundations, through the wallpaper and breaks with her. At emotional high-points her face adapts a brittle and wax-like sheen. A stillness in the features that is impossible to turn from, suggestive only of a character feeling the world outside of herself. The blackness of her eyes, revealing nothing yet everything, is reason enough to go see the film.

Nora, Agnes and Gustav appear as planets revolving around the house, its gravitational pull alighting family feuds, a new conviction in Borg’s work and explorations of a tortured past

The cast is bounded by a magnetic force. And that is the house. It is the film’s emotional centre, occupying neither space nor time, oscillating between histories and lives, between the terror of war, the sexual grandeur of the 60s and 70s, and present-day Norway. It is as much the focal point of this familial narrative as it is a cast member in its own right. Nora, Agnes and Gustav appear as planets revolving around the house, its gravitational pull alighting family feuds, a new conviction in Borg’s work and explorations of a tortured past.

Trier is not afraid to test the limits of this personification. The house is given its own voice by an anonymous narrator. We are told of the house’s delight at people fluttering through its rooms, its watching of young Agnes and Nora run out of sight, and the dull quiet when it is left alone. The result: a sentinel that, despite the pain contained in its walls, remains loved. The sun-like pull of the Borg family home is shown best by Gustav. He is questioned by his lead actress as to why he never left the house after his mother’s death, arguing that “he did”. Yet given his final masterpiece is set where she died, with an actress cast as his own mother, we cannot help but agree with her questioning. The irony is not lost on us. Yet neither is the sentimental value of it all.