Sentimental Value
Upper-Middle Brow is the New Normal
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Joachim Trier’s scaled-up follow-up to The Worst Person in the World sees the reunion of an estranged old-guard auteur father (Stellan Skarsgård) with his millennial daughters (Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), as he gears up to make his return to the cinema. He offers the lead part in his comeback vehicle to Nora (Reinsve), who immediately turns it down before then having to watch her father mold a Hollywood superstar (Elle Fanning as Rachel Kemp) into her image, for this extremely autobiographical film about their family. As far as riffs on arthouse staples go, it’s a perfunctory easy-mode set-up that leaves enough room in the runtime to potentially build out something unique. Unfortunately, unique is one of the last words I’d use to describe this film.
The cold open – depicting the story of the family household through a young Reinsve/Nora’s essayistic prose as means to introduce her perspective as well as the larger family dynamic – shares as much lineage with the midcentury arthouse cinema as it does the contemporary television commercial. That’s not necessarily a disparaging remark either; this is the new middlebrow, in a modern culture where your big-city café coworkers mostly know what the Criterion Closet is, where A24 and NEON are as much cultural signifiers as they are distribution houses, and where pop stars like Charli XCX can declare it to be the summer of Joachim Trier, or the summer of Burger King Rom-Com Auteur Kogonada (who, it should be noted, cut his teeth making Robert Bresson fan edits).
The air of the middle-brow maestro is rarefied; for every James L. Brooks, you have twenty Jason Reitmans. Obviously, Trier’s production circumstances are far different from those two Hollywood filmmakers, but they occupy a similar space for viewers. These are the films that people are a little too eager to declare “Real Movies for Adults” before remarking on any tangible narrative or aesthetic quality. In 2025, which seems to be the year of the upper-middle-brow, Sentimental Value is as normie as it gets.
Forty-three minutes in, the family house in question seems to have been yanked from under the sisters through a loophole of paperwork, and Agnes (Lilleaas) tells Nora to search the house and collect any items that may signify…Sentimental Value. The dual title drop is a stroke too far for me. Oh, we’re gonna look for Sentimental Value in the house that she wrote a famous essay about growing up in? You know, the essay that was read as the Sentimental Value title card popped up? Too easy.
The film that Skarsgård/Gustov Borg attempts to make is very clearly an homage to Tarkovsky’s Mirror, to the point where we’ll likely get some Instagram/X side-by-side comparisons of dank hallways with a slow forward tracking camera when the digital copy comes out, but the scenes that we see from his production come a lot closer to Zemeckis’ Here. Again, normcore. Speaking of arthouse bonafides, there’s a punchline involving DVDs of The Piano Teacher and Irreversible. Festival Humor is my least favorite type of joke in all of cinema. No wonder this got a 15-minute ovation at Cannes — too easy.
Elle Fanning’s Rachel Kemp is an incredibly lazy characterization. She’s a pop actress, a Movie Star, looking to move into the realm of the arts, because she cried at what appeared to be a manipulative Holocaust movie that Borg directed decades back. However, we don’t learn anything about her, other than that the roles she typically plays are “not her.” The strongest indication of her place in cinema is her reference to a long take as a “oner.” In fact, I have a much better understanding of the cinematic and artistic beliefs of Ashleigh Enright than Rachel Kemp. If your memory is failing you, Ashleigh Enright is the character that Fanning played in Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York, which is about as “good” as this movie, but far more interesting.
Reinsve’s Nora is clearly the character which Trier takes the most pleasure in writing, and to whom he pays the most attention. His collaborations with Reinsve have resulted in deeply internal performances that seem to both create individual characters as well as generational stand-ins. The Worst Person in the World was an incredible success in this regard, which is why I was disappointed that so much of Nora’s screentime boils down to the arthouse version of Into The Spider-Verse Depicts Real Panic Attack!!!!
We also don’t know nearly enough about the artistic wills of Gustav Borg for a two-hour movie about his comeback film. To continue banging the drum of another middle-brow maestro, is he any more advanced in his film scholarship than Woody Allen’s Mort Rifkin? In fact, the scenes that depict him and his longtime collaborator gearing up to shoot their film are reminiscent of another film from just a few years ago, Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes. The difference, however, is that Erice is the real deal, a geyser-aged five-decade directing veteran, whereas Joachim Trier is a middle-aged man who is currently breaking through to the American mainstream. He hasn’t earned these scenes. “Too easy” doesn’t begin to describe the button at the end of Gustav’s first presser with his new Hollywood starlet. Not only is “Legendary Director DESTROYS Tik Tok Journalist” something that purely exists for festival audiences and critics, it’s also extremely weak on both dramatic and comedic levels. There is absolutely zero conviction in Borg when he says that Rachel Kemp is the greatest actress of her generation. By the way, if you are a close friend of mine, I’m sorry in advance for texting you “Rachel Kemp is the greatest actress of her generation.” It’s just too easy.
My sentiments are pretty similar to yours regarding the film in general, but come on, the Irreversible/Piano Teacher scene was pretty damn funny! ;)