Sentimental Value

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Dysfunction is the order of the day in “Sentimental Value,” by director Joachim Trier. The film has many knotty tangles, most of them of the paternal variety. The episodes would be insufferable but for the excellent acting of Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve in lead roles.

Nora (Reinsve) is about to go on stage in a big theatrical production in Norway. She is undergoing a major anxiety attack, her mind flashing back to the abandonment of her father Gustav (Skarsgård) and his emotionally violent arguments. Nora refuses to go on. Her wardrobe nearly rips apart.

Nora manages to go on cued by Wendy Carlos’s Symphonie fantastique from “The Shining” soundtrack and the show is a huge success.

At her mother’s funeral, Nora blanches when she notices her father at the funeral. After expressing some awkwardness, Gustav turns away.

The father attempts to connect with Nora, going so far as to write a script for his daughter but she refuses, at times with a poker face at other times with a pained grimace. Events reach the breaking point when Gustaf writes a script wanting his young grandson Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven ) to co-star.

Most every character is under a spiritual or emotional blight. There are deep penetrating frowns, gray shadows and empty rooms. Nora’s sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) bears the strain and is able to compartmentalize, but even she has her challenges.

No one gets off easy.

This is a terrific outing for Skarsgård and is very nearly a career best. He is both emotionally frozen and gregarious, deflecting a guilty conscience. Renate Reinsve is visceral with high voltage. One can feel her oppression.

An arresting part of the film is the concept of the family house as a living emotional organism: a wooden being under a great and gloomy sadness. There is a huge crack in the bedroom ceiling that worsens and grows in severity with every family fight. Here the film echoes the Gothicism of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman. The house is remodeled with each death in the family, seemingly becoming more modern, more pristine and more impersonal. A house maturing into coldness, lack of intimacy and distance. A symbol of the father.

Many issues attack the Borg family from emotional unavailability and Nazis to suicide and demons of depression. We are in stricken Scandinavian terrain well travelled by Bergman, but Trier keeps the charge going with a swift camera, mystery, suspense and the adhesion of two contrasting sisters.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com