Review: 'Sentimental Value' flirts with Hollywood satire, but settles for art-house sniffles
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Renate Reinsve is the new face of Scandinavia: depression with a smile.Standing 5 feet 10 with open, friendly features, the Norwegian talent has a grin that makes her appear at once like an endearing everywoman and a large, unpredictable child.
Reinsve zoomed to international acclaim with her Cannes-winning performance in Joachim Trier’s 2021 “The Worst Person in the World,” a dramedy tailor-made to her lanky, likable style of self-loathing.Now, Trier has written his muse another showcase, “Sentimental Value,” where Reinsve plays an emotionally avoidant theater actor who bounces along in pretty much the same bittersweet key.“Sentimental Value” gets misty about a few things — families, filmmaking, real estate — all while circling a handsome Oslo house where the Borg clan has lived for four generations.
It’s a dream home with red trim on the window frames and pink roses in the yard.Yet, sisters Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) aren’t fighting to keep it, perhaps due to memories of their parents’ hostile divorce or maybe because they don’t want to deal with their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård, wonderful), who grew up there himself and still owns the place, even though he’s moved to Sweden.Trier opens the film with a symbolically laden camera pan across Oslo that ends on a cemetery.
He wants to make sure we understand that while Norway looks idyllic to outsiders jealous that all four Scandinavian countries rank among the globe’s happiest, it can still be as gloomy as during the era of Henrik Ibsen.More impressively, Trier shifts to a fabulous, time-bending historical montage of the house itself over the century-plus it’s belonged to the Borgs.There’s a crack in it that seems to represent the fissures in the family, the flaws in their facade.
Over these images, Reinsve’s Nora recites a 6th-grade school essay she ...