I wrote it for you. You're the only one who can play it.
So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left -- a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes -- those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again.
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
This house in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, my favourite film of his since Oslo, 31. august, holds generations of a family, memories going back decades, a century. People have been born and have died in this house. It made me think of how the rooms of my grandparents’ house in which I spent summers are inscribed in my brain more than any place that I ever actually lived in: built by my grandfather, it held something more than the suburban home of my childhood, and it appears often in my dreams, years after it has been sold and therefore lost to me forever.
Trier uses this house to tell the story of his characters: Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), an aging and well-respected film director who hasn’t finished a project in a long time, spent his childhood there, witnessed his mother’s suicide, then moved away, and later raised his two daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) there with his wife, until a divorce and an abandonment that sits at the centre of the film like a bleeding wound. The house itself has a literal crack in it, a foundational fault, one that feels like it symbolises the pain and hurt that has existed in the family: in Nora’s childhood, she once did a project on a house that imagined it as a living being with preferences, for being full, or maybe empty and silent, lived in, for holding life, but the crack in the wall made it feel like the house had been slowly collapsing ever since it was built, threatening to take its inhabitants with it, suspending them in a slow fall towards the ground.
At the beginning of the film, Gustav is about to return to Oslo, and his children are packing up the decades of memories, all the keepsakes that have filled the house, readying it for a potential sale. It’s the kind of task that makes it impossible not to ruminate on what has happened in the past. Agnes, now a historian, is investigating the family history, specifically a first wound. Gustav’s mother, arrested during the German occupation for anti-Nazi activities, was tortured in prison – we see her flicking through the horrifying pages of the re-enactment, imagining the grandmother she never met and how she would have returned carrying that trauma into Gustav’s childhood. Gustav has written a script, his most personal yet, and wants his daughter Nora, who is now a successful stage and television actress (with horrifying stage fright), to play his own mother. The script is written for her, but she can not forgive that he left them in childhood, and every interaction these two have with each other is terse and ends in an argument. Gustav does not value the theatre (he dislikes that she acts in centuries-old plays – he likes her acting, but not the format), he thinks television is too small for her. He does not show up for her premieres. Nora turns him down because she cannot be around her father for too long. Gustav only knows how to express himself through writing, but his profession, his obsession with his art, was the reason for his leaving: he could not figure out how to be an artist and a father at the same time, he could not show up for his family and create at the same time. Even with his grandson, he only connects through (profoundly age-inappropriate) films: for Christmas, he gifts a parcel full of DVDs, including Haneke’s The Piano Teacher of all things (“to help him learn about the maternal instinct” he explains, luckily Agnes does not have a DVD player). He loves and is proud of his daughters but the only way he knows to include them, to be around them, is to make films with them. We see a retrospective film screening of a movie he made 20 years ago with Agnes, the younger daughter, that must have been close to the last thing he completed before he left them. Agnes is fantastic in it but she did not become an actress, as if something about the experience deterred her.
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Instead of Nora, Gustav casts Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). He is charmed by her adoration for him and his films, and her involvement means funding – from Netflix, of all places, an arrangement that seems doomed from the start for a director who has such a clear conception of complete artistic freedom and disdain for economic constraints. It reminded me of Olivier Assayas’ 2022
Irma Vep show, a thinly veiled satire about the director making a series about his own film, made by HBO – as much about film production conditions in the 2020s as it was about his personal life. They work on the script together in the house. Gustav is deliberately elusive about how much of this story is truly his, about what is authentic and what isn’t – in one scene claiming his mother used a footstool to hang herself that his daughter, in on the joke, identifies as being from IKEA. Rachel is excited for the project but realises soon that she is only a second choice. Gustav asks her to die her hair the same colour of Nora, and meeting her, she realises that she is a stand-in for someone else, an obvious approximation because she is forcing this personal story of Gustav’s childhood trauma – his mother hanging herself in the house when he was seven - to be translated into English. There is a conflict here, an alienation and mis-translation: hoping to bridge it, she practices a fake Scandinavian accent so that the difference between her and the other actors in the film won’t stand out too much, but it becomes obvious immediately that this is a fundamentally flawed undertaking that threatens to undermine the film. Rachel is genuine and passionate enough about the project to drop out in time.
Gustav’s script, once Agnes reads it, hesitant to allow her own son to perform the role of Gustav in it, appears several times throughout the film: Gustav carries it around in a plastic bag, Nora refuses to read it because reading it would be a concession to her father, or it might reveal something about him she isn’t ready to face. In reading it, Agnes realises that it is a love letter to Nora more than Gustav’s mother: it may have been written about Agnes’ grandmother, but it was written for Nora, with Gustav, who they think unaware of Nora’s own suicide attempt, managing to write about it like it indirectly through his mother’s death. It’s like the crack in the house, persisting through the decades, unavoidable, a repeating pattern in their family history. The film is about the terse relationship between the two sisters and their fathers, but it is at its most moving when it shows how Nora and Agnes survived their childhood together, and especially, how Nora made the kind of childhood for Agnes that allowed her to thrive, and eventually make her own family, because she was not alone and had someone care for her when her parents didn’t. “I had you”, Agnes says in the pivotal scene of the film. Gustav’s insistence that life irritates art so much that he had to leave to continue making films is undermined: instead, what the house held in all those years was the two sisters and love for each other. In the end, the house itself is transformed, completely stripped of its history by a pre-sale transformation that turns it into the kind of indistinguishable canvas of every 2020s trend in interior decoration. Grey surfaces, new floorboards, empty surfaces, undistinguishable furniture, the crack presumably plastered and painted over, it has died, in a way, become separated from its history and how it intertwines with the Borgs. Instead, Gustav is finally filming his film on a sound stage which through the presence of the actors and the story alone becomes authentic. It’s not a home that has ever held people, but it is ready to hold their lives regardless. transposed into the present tense, with Nora in the leading role and her nephew acting alongside her, the story loses none of its poignancy, because it is about the people that Gustav, in his own lacking way, loves.
2025, directed by Joachim Trier, starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Anders Danielsen Lie, Øyvind Hesjedal Loven.
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