On 22 January he finally arrives in the Italian theatres Sentimental Value, Norwegian film (winner of the Grand Prix Speciale della Giuria at the 78th Cannes Film Festival) which marks the return of the talented director of The worst person in the world, Joachim Trier. Trier returns to direct Renate Reinsve, winner in Cannes for his interpretation in The worst person in the world, thus continuing a creative relationship already widely rewarded by international criticism. Next to her, Stellan Skarsgård – awarded the Golden Globe Award as Best Actor Not Leading for this film – Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas make up a cast of great talent, contributing to make Sentimental Value one of the most anticipated titles of the season.
Sentimental Value, la storia di una famiglia
Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are two deeply united sisters. The sudden return to their life of their father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) – a charismatic and charming director but a chronically unreliable parent – reopens wounds never completely remarginated. Knowing Nora’s talent as an actress, Gustav would like her daughter to play the main role in the film that should relaunch her career; She refuses and that part ends up at a young Hollywood star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning).
His arrival displeased in the delicate dynamics of the family: for the two sisters will be the time to confront the father and their past.
La casa di famiglia
The houses are places that silently guard secrets, smiles, tears. Sometimes they’re shelters, other prisons. The family house, that of childhood, that of holidays: houses to be remembered or, other times, houses to be forgotten. Some are far from safe places, even if they should be; others become “home” even if you have lived little. Houses are often like parents, brothers, sisters: Some know us well, others almost for nothing. Others, even from afar, seem to know everything about us.
If we stop to ask ourselves “what is it, for me, home?”, not always the answer comes easily. There is a saying that houses do not steal objects, but they can hide them: the same they do with memories, especially with the worst ones. They close them in a attic, even if a attic is not there, styping them in a closet, hiding them behind one of those doors that never open.
The house of Nora and Agnes, like many houses, has seen so many happen: sad and happy, painful and overwhelming moments. Nora from there wants to barely take a pot, because she prefers not to store soulless objects in her apartment in Oslo. There are things in that house that you prefer not to remember. There are silences in which he chooses to take refuge, wounds he wants to hide from everyone, except Agnes. Her father tells her that she will regret not having children, and she knows that it is so, because she will not have anyone to hand down something in the future. Who will take away a memory from his house when he is gone?
Houses and memories can turn out to be traps if they are not faced when someone leaves us: become prisons of deafening silences, of memories deformed by suffering, of senses of guilt so deep that they are no longer traceable to a precise origin.
In Sentimental Value Joachim Trier demonstrates – once again – that he can tell with delicacy and an unmistakable style the wounds of the human soul. He can tell the fragility and cracks of family relationships, as well as the contradictions of contemporary relationships – amorous, friendly, between father and daughter.
His stylistic figure is evident and constant and, even with this film, as already in The worst person in the world, Trier manages to make an intimately familiar story universal and choral. Renate Reinsve plays impeccablely Nora, a character who seems to have come out of a page of Čechov: a woman who has been wearing a wound for so long that she almost forgot when everything started. An introverted daughter, a generous but unintentionally hostile sister to affection. Next to her, a magnificent Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, intense and deep in the role of Agnes, the older sister that everyone deserves. And by their side, an immense Stellan Skarsgård, who interprets a father in search of a redemption buried under years of not-called, emotional shortcomings and emotional detachment.
Sentimental Value is a layered, delicate and overwhelming film: a work that does not attempt to correct errors, but to cross them, looking until the end – perhaps – a possibility of healing.
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