Sentimental Value is a film about a family, but it's also a film about a house. In The Worst Person in the World director Joachim Trier's latest, the dysfunctional Borg family and their Oslo home are inextricable from each other – it's been in the family for generations, through the Second World War, death, and suffering, and it takes on the quality of a haunted house. There are ghosts in these walls.
The film follows stage actor Nora (Renate Reinsve) and historian Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), sisters who are estranged from their father, acclaimed movie director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård). He left Norway to focus on his career decades earlier after divorcing their mother, but unexpectedly turns up at their mother's wake with two things on his mind: he wants the house back, and he wants to offer Nora a job.
Gustav is working on a film inspired by his own family history, which will be filmed in the family home where he grew up, and culminate in his mother's suicide. He wrote the part based on his mother for Nora, but she refuses to work with him – or even read the script – on account of their difficult relationship. Gustav goes on to offer the part to Hollywood actor Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) instead, and her involvement helps secure funding from Netflix to make the film.
Mutual (mis)understandings
Despite seeing great success earlier in his professional life, Gustav hasn't made a movie in 15 years. His career isn't exactly booming, but neither is Rachel's – her last film bombed, and she's on the verge of quitting acting. They bond one night after being introduced at an afterparty at a French film festival and, on the surface, they make an unlikely pair. However, their friendship isn't so dissimilar from the one between their real-life counterparts, and Fanning tells GamesRadar+ that her and Skarsgård's shared experiences as child actors gave them a "mutual understanding."
As for their characters, "Gustav sees something in [Rachel] that ignites this light in her again," Fanning says. "She's felt a bit lost, and so having him see her, and feel like he really sees her, and then to ultimately give her this opportunity, it's a beautiful thing. And I think he's much more open to Rachel than he is with his own daughters."
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Indeed, Gustav's personal relationships are at odds with his filmmaking, Skarsgård thinks. "He is capable of feelings, and he's capable of expressing feelings," he tells us. "He's excellent at it in his art, but he's clumsy in his personal life, and it's funny to see him trying. It's comic, and it's tragic at the same time. It's very funny, but you also feel that he really wants to do it, but he can't, and that's the key to him."
One particularly humorous scene that exemplifies this is during Agnes' son Erik's birthday party, when Gustav gives his nine-year-old grandson a copy of Michael Haneke's psychosexual drama The Piano Teacher on DVD. Baffled by the gesture, Agnes tells him, "We don't even have a DVD player." It's a clever and bittersweet moment that shows Gustav isn't just out of touch with his own family, but with the film industry more broadly.
"In spite of being the same age as me, he's of an older generation, and he's a 20th-century man," Skarsgård explains, before referencing a scene in which Gustav and Rachel are being interviewed at a press junket. "It's like the interview discussion when he gets the question, 'Will the film be shown in the cinemas?' 'Of course, where else would it be shown?' He doesn't quite get that Netflix might not show it."
Art imitates life
Discussing a press junket during a press junket isn't the only way art imitates life in Sentimental Value: Fanning isn't just playing an American actor in a Norwegian production, she was an American actor on the set of a Norwegian film. "There were aspects and scenes that I could understand very, very well, and were happening in real time around me. So you can't help but acknowledge and take that in," she says.
"It was fun to calibrate her just right and toe that line of her, because I think she could have easily slipped into a cliche, vapid Hollywood star. But Joachim is not interested in characters that are one-dimensional, and so I loved getting to flesh her out in the many layers of her."
It's not hard to imagine a version of this film in which Rachel is an unsympathetic character, but Fanning's performance and Trier's script make us feel for her wholeheartedly. Not only has she found herself on the outside of her industry during a fallow point in her career, but her supposed comeback role has put her on the outside of a family rift she can't ever fully understand.
If the Borg's home is a haunted house, Rachel is an unwitting visitor who doesn't quite grasp the price of admission. Still, she's integral to the eventual dismantling of its ghostly walls, whether she's fully aware of it or not, as Gustav's film tries to make sense of his painful past. Trier "had to audition many houses," Fanning says, to find the right one to play one of the film's most vital roles. "For me, it felt like a very special space."
Sentimental Value is out now in UK cinemas. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
