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The show must go on, but only barely, in this scene from the Norwegian drama “Sentimental Value,” directed by Joachim Trier and nominated for nine Oscars this season, including best picture.
The sequence, which comes early in the film, features Renate Reinsve as Nora, a stage actress at the National Theater in Oslo, who develops an intense bout of stage fright moments before her performance is about to begin. She nearly rips herself right out of her costume in her struggle.
Narrating the scene, Trier said that he was “interested in exploring the approach avoidance mechanism of stage fright,” the idea of being deeply pulled to a thing that shapes who we are, yet also being disgusted by it.
He said it taps into the core of what the movie is about: “the ambivalence between people who are working artistically and the inability to create a life and a home outside of that kind of fictional space that they work within.”
One moment in the scene, after Nora has tried to rip her costume off, has a group of people taping up the seams.
“They’re stitching up her dress, and when she’s about to appear onstage, no one in the audience will see how everything is just stuck together by duct tape and anxiety and people barely making it.”
He continued, “It looks very elegant and impressive, and I think that’s — for all of us who create something, even movies, it’s barely stitched together by gaffer tape, and we just hope that the audience will feel something and engage with it.”
Read the “Sentimental Value” review.
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Mekado Murphy writes about the world of movies and produces the Anatomy of a Scene video series.
The post Watch Renate Reinsve Struggle With Stage Fright in ‘Sentimental Value’ appeared first on New York Times.
