Sentimental Value (2025, Joachim Trier)

42/100

Dunno if I'd say there are actual spoilers below, but I do give away a pretty funny joke right off the bat.

Like all of my friends who've seen Sentimental Value, I cracked up when Stellan Skarsgård's art-film director gifted his roughly 10-year-old grandson with DVDs of Irreversible and The Piano Teacher (though I'm old enough not to have caught without prompting from dialogue that giving a small child any DVD, however age-appropriate, is now likely to be pointless). Yet that's one of many reasons I didn't much like this movie, and clarifies for me why Trier's films (all of them to date co-written with Eskil Vogt, so I blame him, too) invariably leave me dissatisfied. That hearty laugh comes at the expense of Value's...well, value. Its dramatic integrity. We've spent a fair amount of time with Skarsgård's Gustav by that point, and he's simply not the sort of man who'd be either impish or oblivious enough to say "Here, little boy, enjoy this ten-minute graphic rape scene and also a woman mutilating her vagina." There are richly complex movie characters for whom that might make sense—I could see Terry in You Can Count on Me pulling such a stunt, for example, considering it "righteous" somehow. (And I'm sure Bilge's gonna show up momentarily to inform me that he was handed a copy of Salò at age six or something.) But it felt utterly false here, included because Trier and Vogt found it funny and weren't concerned with whether or not it's credible. Filmmakers who toss every idea that occurs to them into the mix drive me crazy much more often than they don't.

Still, that's admittedly a trivial example. Here's one that's more significant. Following a prologue that makes it seem as if this will be a movie about a house (which it really isn't, despite the late symbolic remodeling), we're introduced to Renate Reinsve's Nora experiencing a severe case of stage fright at a National Theatre premiere. Disregard for now the fact that I found this depiction of debilitating nerves less than persuasive. It's got zilch to do with the rest of the movie. Omitting it would alter nothing whatsoever. No event in her life triggered it, and it doesn't recur. I actually spent much of the next hour uncertain whether or not the film's chronology was scrambled, without any clear markers—that's how retroactively arbitrary it seems given everything that immediately follows. While I can readily think of cogent thematic functions for Nora's panic attack, all of them demand that this moment not be one-and-done. It's as if Trier and Vogt came up with that scene as a killer character intro and then just kinda forgot about it as they continued writing. Which obviously can't be the case, but still, they didn't think about the movie as a whole nearly enough to suit me.

That's Ed, the movie as a whole turns out to be mostly about adult children's resentment of a parent who wasn't there for them when they were kids, a subject that I confess to finding wearisome (albeit less so than tales of tyrannical parents actively warping their kids' lives). So it's possible that I'd have been underwhelmed regardless. But when I inevitably rewatch Sentimental Value a couple of months from now, just to make sure I didn't miss the boat (that does happen), you're probably gonna get a long list of all the elements, large and small, that just plain bugged me, including but by no means limited to (1) the herky-jerk use of an omniscient narrator (fine at the outset, annoying when it recurs, especially when all of a sudden it's not recounting the distant past); (2) Elle Fanning's movie star serving solely as blatant counterpoint (resulting in the first performance I've seen from her that flirts with being bad—mostly she seems lost, which I guess one could argue fits the circumstances, but I really just did not buy that woman on any level); (3) speaking of which, hey, at least address in passing the possibility (I would say likelihood) that no more Rachel = no more financing for this project; (4) the weird-ass rehearsal scene in which Rachel asks Gustav who the antecedent of her character's cryptic statement "You know" is, gets no useful answer, and then proceeds to perform a scene that does not include those words, we will never hear them again, so huh?; (5) Gustav instantly ditching his beloved long-time DP because the guy now requires a cane to get around (WTF? another moment that makes me want to ask Trier and Vogt, "Do you guys know any, like, people?"); and just for fun because I guffawed at this, too (6) a montage of Nora finally reading her dad's script that has her holding it aloft while she brushes her teeth at the bathroom sink. As one does. Real page-turner, that! Anyway, not for me, bewildered as usual by all the raves (Worst Person in the World was my 66th favorite film of 2021), but I will likely feel obligated to try again.

(Actually I see now that my favorite non-Lars Trier is Louder Than Bombs, 58/100, which I think fans may consider his weakest.)