The Lives of Artists

Sentimental Value a film by Joachin Trier.  With Renata Reinsue, Stellan Skaargard, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning.  Streaming on various platforms.  *****

Sentimental Value is a movie about two great—and greatly troubled—artists.  Gustav Borg (Stellan Skaargard) is an aging filmmaker who had many successes in the past but seems not to have done too well recently.  He was also a man who led a bohemian lifestyle, drinking a lot, flirting with women, sleeping with actresses.  His marriage to a psychiatrist didn’t work out, and he had left it many years before.  But he has now written a screenplay that is among his best; he thinks it is his masterpiece, and people who read it are mightily impressed.  The problem is that there is only one actress who seems right for the central role, and he’s not sure she’s available.

That would be his daughter Nora (Renata Reinsue), who has worked primarily as a stage actress.  Borg has two daughters, and while both were troubled by the arguing between the parents and their father’s early absence from their lives, the younger daughter Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) has settled into a conventional life with a husband and small child.  Nora hasn’t been able to make a relationship work—she’s having an affair with a married colleague as the movie opens—and constantly makes reference to how “fucked-up” she is.  She tells her married lover as they’re lying in post-coital bliss that she’s 80% fucked up.  He’s seeing the other 20%.

We are introduced to Nora when we see her experiencing stage fright before a performance, and though I’ve often had stage fright, I’ve never seen anything like this.  She’s wearing some kind of corset for her role but has the sensation she can’t breathe (I know that feeling[1]).  She panics, stalling in her dressing room when the play is about to begin, forcing the director (who was in the audience) to come and retrieve her, asking her lover to slap her face, failing to enter the stage even after the opening music had started, so the production came to a grinding halt (she insisted on removing the corset to enable her breathing, and her costume had to be fastened with tape).  We watch from behind as she slowly makes a late entrance onto the stage, and see the vast audience—like in an opera hall—sitting in silence, one of the most suspenseful and frightening moments I’ve ever seen in a movie.  She lets out a bold shout and the play begins.  She’s found a way to channel her fear into her performance.

The problem with getting these two people together is that, while both daughters are uncomfortable around their father, Nora bristles with anger.  She contains her rage when he shows up at the old family house for his ex-wife’s funeral, but when she later meets hm in a restaurant at his request, she lets it rip, and tells him that there’s not a chance in the world she’ll work with him.  She can’t even talk to him.

For Gustav, it’s almost as if she isn’t his daughter: she’s a great actress and he needs her in his movie, not only because she’s perfect for the role, but because she will attract backers.  He’s having trouble financing the film, and is working with Netflix (I assume that’s a comedown and a compromise for him).  I suddenly realized in a new way the difficulties of a filmmaker’s art.  He has a vision, and like other writers has to go through the difficulty of embodying it in a script.  But that’s only a part of the process: he has to get the actors, has to get the money.  This is an older man who hasn’t had a hit in a while and whose time is running out.  Though he’s obviously not father of the year material, in fact is hardly a father at all, I felt for him.

He settles for a famous American actress named Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), and though she seems accomplished at what she does, she doesn’t have the gravitas for this role.  Compared to Nora, she seems young; she will have to do the role in English, which isn’t ideal; she wonders if she should be speaking with an accent, to make things more authentic, and she can’t help noticing that Gustav has done everything he can to make her look like Nora, even dying her hair.  The man is a great director, and this is a huge opportunity for her, but she can see this isn’t her role and is afraid of disappointing him.

The play concerns a woman psychiatrist who, during the second World War, was arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis, suffering abuse at their hands, eventually committing suicide.  The character is based on Gustave’s mother, and we thereby get a glimpse into his troubled past, and what might have made him an artist, also might have made him a lousy husband and father (though he’s hardly the first film director to have affairs with actresses).  These events are a part of his past, also of Nora’s family past, and her anxiety is the flip side of her depression.  Rachel can’t get into that head space.  She’s a different kind of person.

Several scenes stand out for me.  In one, Rachel tries to read a key soliloquy, and though she does her best and gets into the emotion, she’s somehow skimming the surface; she isn’t really there.  Later in the film, Agnes has seen the script and gets Nora to read the same speech; without having even seen the words before, she makes the whole thing much more authentic.

There’s also a scene late in the movie when the two sisters talk and Nora wonders why she’s so fucked up (her expression; she keeps coming back to it) while Agnes is so normal.  Agnes has the answer to that, and the way the sisters bond in that scene is a rare moment on the screen.  It might be the best moment in the whole film.

My wife and I couldn’t help comparing this to Jay Kelly, which we watched the week before, another movie about a showbiz dad and a neglected daughter, and though I liked that movie more than she did, we both agreed that this one is far deeper and more impressive, at the top of my list for the whole year.  This Mexican standoff between father and daughter does not have an easy or sappy resolution, but it does resolve itself.  The final scene is brilliant.

[1] https://tricycle.org/magazine/stage-fright/?utm_campaign=00390455&utm_source=p3s4h3r3s