(3.5 stars)
One of the stealthier ways to assess the talent of an actress is to watch her play an actress on film. A role within a role — an exercise requiring her not only to pretend to be another person, but to pretend to be another person pretending to be another person, layer upon layer upon layer. Ariana Grande weirdly comes to mind: Until you see her playacting as a merely decent singer on “Saturday Night Live,” you don’t appreciate her true vocal talents, or her keen ear for discerning what separates decent from great.
In Joachim Trier’s family drama “Sentimental Value,” we are treated to two versions of this: Elle Fanning and Renate Reinsve both play thespians — Fanning a Hollywood starlet named Rachel, Reinsve an Oslo stage veteran named Nora — who (spoiler alert) find themselves occupying the same character and delivering the same monologue. Rachel delivers it serviceably, in the way of mass-market leading ladies, and her adequate execution only makes it clear that Fanning is actually a very good actress. Nora delivers it excellently, and her quiet, unfussy execution makes it clear that Reinsve has offered us one of the most transcendent performances of the year.
The role in question was written by Nora’s estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), a celebrated, self-centered director whose latest project is the semiautobiographical retelling of a tragedy in the family’s past. He’s written the lead with Nora in mind, but she refuses to accept the part; their relationship is too fragile to withstand a professional collaboration. So, while attending a retrospective of his own work, Gustav instead befriends and casts Rachel, whose A-list status guarantees the project’s financing but who cannot possibly imagine the emotional weight she will now be expected to carry.
Co-written by Trier and his longtime collaborator, Eskil Vogt, “Sentimental Value” is billed as a story about a father and daughters’ complicated relationship with each other. But it’s equally about their complicated relationship with their art. Nora talks about the pleasure and relief of slipping into other people’s skin, a transformation that allows her to escape the noise in her own head. Gustav cannot figure out how to tell his family he loves them, but he pens them the most beautiful roles (his younger daughter, Agnes — played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas — was the child star of his most famous film). Despite his desire to work with his older daughter, we learn that Gustav has never sat through a full performance of one of Nora’s plays, which she interprets as pathological uninterest but which might, in a twisted way, actually be deep love: Because he viscerally understands the vulnerability of performance, Gustav cannot stand to watch Nora expose herself unless he is the director keeping her safe.
In one scene, Rachel tells Gustav she’s having a hard time understanding the motivation of the character he’s asked her to play, a fictionalized version of his own mother. Gustav, whom Skarsgard plays tremendously as both swaggering and fading, responds by asking her what she thinks the character is feeling. You get the sense that he is asking not as a skilled director, but rather as the small boy who never figured out his mom, who wishes he could have, and who hopes that by re-creating his family on-screen, he’ll finally see the answers he couldn’t get to in real life.
The film is steeped in melancholy, a world populated by people who understand they are not exactly all right but don’t quite understand why. They are haunted by generational trauma. Father and daughters move about their grand old house — a character in itself, with cracks spreading like vines and strange acoustic oddities — which begins as the family’s homestead and then slowly transforms into a movie set: Gustav wants to film his new project on location. At times, it’s not clear when this family of artists is acting and when they’re not, or whether they even know the difference.
All of this might come across as either depressing or erudite, but “Sentimental Value” is neither. The world feels, instead, lived-in and deeply human: an emotional palette that will seem familiar to fans of Trier and Reinsve’s previous collaboration, 2021’s critically acclaimed subversive romantic comedy “The Worst Person in the World.” It feels less like a movie and more like the old house has opened its doors and allowed us to peek inside for a few rambling hours.
And by the time Reinsve delivers her version of the monologue, it feels less like watching an actress playing an actress, and more like watching a daughter finally understand something about her father, and her sister, and her grandmother and her home — and, in so doing, finally understand something about herself.
R. At area theaters. Contains some language, including a sexual reference, and brief nudity. In Norwegian and English with subtitles. 134 minutes.
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