Separating the art from the artist can be easier debated than done. In 1967, Roland Barthes infamously argued in his essay “The Death of the Author” that a writer’s biography should be irrelevant to the meaning or value of their work. In 1983, Nora Ephron asserted the opposite in her novel, Heartburn: “Everything is copy.”
Today’s pop culture has tended to agree with Ephron’s take: Confession fuels the biggest songs; celebrity memoirs dominate best-seller lists. Whether art is inextricable from the artist is central to many of the buzzy dramas vying for trophies during this year’s awards season, too. Hamnet imagines the intimate origins of Shakespeare’s famed tragedy Hamlet. Blue Moon and Jay Kelly follow men who have infused their work with so much of their personal life that they find it hard to exist outside of their career. These movies observe how art can function as therapy for the creator, extracting a truth that they couldn’t grasp otherwise.
Sentimental Value, an emotionally layered film up for eight Golden Globes this weekend, complicates that perspective. It follows a family of storytellers: Gustav (played by Stellan Skarsgård) is a celebrated director hoping to cast his estranged daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), an actor, in his first project in 15 years. Nora’s sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), is a historian who helps Gustav with researching his script. The tender drama is the latest from the Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier who, along with his co-writer, Eskil Vogt, has made plenty of features about creative types. The protagonists of 2006’s Reprise are novelists. The story of 2015’s Louder Than Bombs hinges on the work of a war photographer. The aimless heroine of their 2021 Oscar-nominated romantic dramedy, The Worst Person in the World, abandons medical school to pursue writing and photography instead.
Focusing on artistic characters became a pattern—enough that conceiving of Sentimental Value, in part, as a movie about moviemaking brought “a certain shame to Eskil and me,” Trier told me recently, grinning sheepishly at the memory. “We were like, ‘Oh no, are we really doing a film about actors and directors?’” The conceit, they worried, could come off as extremely narrow; the plot’s emphasis on the production of Gustav’s movie could pull focus away from the emotional stakes, turning Sentimental Value into commentary on the film industry instead.
But when I watched the film, I found myself, like many viewers, wondering something different: whether the father-daughter relationships depicted echoed any of Trier’s own feelings about becoming a parent. Those reactions didn’t surprise the filmmaker. Since the movie’s debut at the Cannes Film Festival, Trier has spoken often about how having children affected his mindset going into Sentimental Value. In one interview, he conceded that the movie was in part about “exorcising fears” about fatherhood; when we spoke, however, he seemed to bristle at that phrasing. He wasn’t trying to extract his personal anxieties and commit them to celluloid, he clarified. Making his private thoughts so public in his work, he said, “would be my nightmare.”
If anything, Sentimental Value is about that tension between wanting to explain the origin of your ideas and wanting to distance yourself from your own creations. It also interrogates the cost of drawing from specific, individual experiences. “You deserve something more personal,” Gustav tells Nora when pitching her his screenplay, failing to notice how dismissive the comment sounds of her career. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of her artistry, too: Everything Nora does on stage has always been “personal.” When embodying a character, she can express herself more authentically, something Gustav would know if he ever saw her perform. But Nora suffers from severe stage fright as a result; being able to access her feelings under a fictional guise doesn’t mean she’s necessarily embracing them. The truth behind the most intimate art can remain a mystery, Sentimental Value posits—even for the artist.
A film is “lifeless,” Trier said, unless its viewers discover what is personal to them as they watch. “You have a wonderful word in English that we don’t have in Norwegian,” he said, “and that is verisimilitude, the idea of some sort of contract with the viewer that conveys a sense of truthfulness, yet it’s a construct. It’s a code.” The goal, in other words, is for the story to feel genuine without being explicitly so.
That can happen when a performer imbues her character with her own nature. In one of the film’s most affecting moments, Agnes visits a melancholic Nora, who has been unwilling to perform after Gustav moved forward with his movie without her; he recruited an American star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), to play the part he’d written for Nora, and has immediately bonded with Rachel. After Agnes encourages Nora to read their father’s script, the sisters marvel at how Gustav reveals, in his writing, a side of himself they’d never seen. Nora goes on to wonder how Agnes turned out stable in such a forbidding household. “I had you,” Agnes replies, before crawling onto Nora’s bed to embrace her. Agnes then whispers, “I love you”—a line that Lilleaas came up with on the spot.
The ad-lib dramatically changed the scene from how Trier and Vogt had written it. The dynamic between the sisters was originally more antagonistic: Agnes would be carefree, the one in the family hoping to “make everyone happy through humor and avoidance,” Trier told me—much to her sister’s annoyance. But Lilleaas, Trier explained, conveyed a “calm, grounded, truthful honesty” when they first met, outside of a formal audition. Her demeanor inspired him: “I could look into her eyes as we talked and I felt, You’re real, like really grounded. And then I thought, Let’s reinterpret Agnes.”
Realism and fiction occasionally do combine in Sentimental Value in more anticipated ways. The film is purposefully a family affair for Trier: His two children appear briefly as Nora and Agnes in flashbacks. Gustav’s screenplay is inspired by memories of his mother’s imprisonment in a Nazi camp; her experiences echo those of Trier’s paternal grandfather, the filmmaker Erik Løchen. (Trier has reviewed the files on his grandfather’s captivity the same way Agnes does in one scene, studying the reports about how her grandmother was tortured.) And the actor who narrates the opening scene, describing an essay Nora wrote as a child that anthropomorphized the family home, is Bente Børsum. She’s a celebrated performer in Norway who starred in Løchen’s 1959 film, The Chasers.
Trier doesn’t expect audiences to know any of the above. Sentimental Value avoids explaining, for instance, who the speaker is in relation to the characters on-screen, let alone the fact that a younger Børsum had seen her mother taken to a German camp, too. “Her voice held a lot of weight for me,” Trier said of his choice to include the 91-year-old actor. The film draws power from the subtle specificity; Børsum’s voice, low and knowing, comes suffused with an ineffable meaning. The viewer immediately feels encouraged to pay closer attention to the narration.
These veiled decisions inform the movie Gustav eventually directs as well: He’d wanted the shoot to take place inside Agnes and Nora’s childhood home, but eventually settles for a reproduction on a back lot, a series of ceiling-less facades. A viewer wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s a set, but the care and history Gustav has brought to it lends it an abstract profundity. The opportunity afforded by art for artists to examine—or just merely observe—themselves is essential. “I need to distance myself from the characters to be able to create them,” Trier said. What’s on-screen is akin to “a counter-life,” he explained. “It’s not intended to say, ‘Hey, look at me!’ It’s saying, ‘I’m doing this about something that’s deeply personal, and yet I feel that it’s over there.’”
A film such as Sentimental Value, then, operates like a time capsule for its maker: It reveals its potency to Trier only in the rearview, when he revisits what had been on his mind. “It’s like conversations with friends,” Trier said. “If someone says, ‘I sense around our latest coffees over the last year, that you talk a lot about this. What’s the purpose?’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean, purpose?’” He laughed. “Shit, I don’t know. But I know I care about it.”
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