{"id":676015,"date":"2026-01-05T18:59:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T18:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/676015\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T18:59:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T18:59:10","slug":"the-real-story-that-sentimental-value-is-telling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/676015\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Story That \u2018Sentimental Value\u2019 Is Telling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Separating the art from the artist can be easier debated than done. In 1967, Roland Barthes infamously argued in his essay \u201cThe Death of the Author\u201d that a writer\u2019s biography should be irrelevant to the meaning or value of their work. In 1983, Nora Ephron asserted<\/a> the opposite in her novel, Heartburn<\/a>: \u201cEverything is copy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s pop culture has tended to agree with Ephron\u2019s 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\u2019s awards season, too. Hamnet<\/a> imagines the intimate origins of Shakespeare\u2019s famed tragedy Hamlet. Blue Moon<\/a> and<\/a> Jay Kelly<\/a> 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\u2019t grasp otherwise.<\/p>\n

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 Skarsg\u00e5rd) is a celebrated director hoping to cast his estranged daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), an actor, in his first project in 15 years. Nora\u2019s 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\u2019s Reprise are novelists. The story of 2015\u2019s 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<\/a>, abandons medical school to pursue writing and photography instead.<\/p>\n

Read: The Worst Person in the World is devastatingly relatable<\/a><\/p>\n

Focusing on artistic characters became a pattern\u2014enough that conceiving of Sentimental Value, in part, as a movie about moviemaking brought \u201ca certain shame to Eskil and me,\u201d Trier told me recently, grinning sheepishly at the memory. \u201cWe were like, \u2018Oh no, are we really doing a film about actors and directors?\u2019\u201d The conceit, they worried, could come off as extremely narrow; the plot\u2019s emphasis on the production of Gustav\u2019s movie could pull focus away from the emotional stakes, turning Sentimental Value into commentary on the film industry instead.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s own feelings about becoming a parent. Those reactions didn\u2019t surprise the filmmaker. Since the movie\u2019s debut at the Cannes Film Festival, Trier has spoken often about how having children affected his mindset going into Sentimental Value. In one interview<\/a>, he conceded that the movie was in part about \u201cexorcising fears\u201d about fatherhood; when we spoke, however, he seemed to bristle at that phrasing. He wasn\u2019t trying to extract his personal anxieties and commit them to celluloid, he clarified. Making his private thoughts so public in his work, he said, \u201cwould be my nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cYou deserve something more personal,\u201d Gustav tells Nora when pitching her his screenplay, failing to notice how dismissive the comment sounds of her career. It\u2019s a fundamental misunderstanding of her artistry, too: Everything Nora does on stage has always been \u201cpersonal.\u201d 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\u2019t mean she\u2019s necessarily embracing them. The truth behind the most intimate art can remain a mystery, Sentimental Value posits\u2014even for the artist.<\/p>\n

A film is \u201clifeless,\u201d Trier said, unless its viewers discover what is personal to them as they watch. \u201cYou have a wonderful word in English that we don\u2019t have in Norwegian,\u201d he said, \u201cand that is verisimilitude, the idea of some sort of contract with the viewer that conveys a sense of truthfulness, yet it\u2019s a construct. It\u2019s a code.\u201d The goal, in other words, is for the story to feel genuine without being explicitly so.<\/p>\n

That can happen when a performer imbues her character with her own nature. In one of the film\u2019s 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\u2019d written for Nora, and has immediately bonded with Rachel. After Agnes encourages Nora to read their father\u2019s script, the sisters marvel at how Gustav reveals, in his writing, a side of himself they\u2019d never seen. Nora goes on to wonder how Agnes turned out stable in such a forbidding household. \u201cI had you,\u201d Agnes replies, before crawling onto Nora\u2019s bed to embrace her. Agnes then whispers, \u201cI love you\u201d\u2014a line that Lilleaas came up with<\/a> on the spot.<\/p>\n

Read: The sad dads of Hollywood<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u201cmake everyone happy through humor and avoidance,\u201d Trier told me\u2014much to her sister\u2019s annoyance. But Lilleaas, Trier explained, conveyed a \u201ccalm, grounded, truthful honesty\u201d when they first met, outside of a formal audition. Her demeanor inspired him: \u201cI could look into her eyes as we talked and I felt, You\u2019re real, like really grounded. And then I thought, Let\u2019s reinterpret Agnes.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s screenplay is inspired by memories of his mother\u2019s imprisonment in a Nazi camp; her experiences echo those of Trier\u2019s paternal grandfather, the filmmaker Erik L\u00f8chen. (Trier has reviewed the files on his grandfather\u2019s 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 B\u00f8rsum. She\u2019s a celebrated performer in Norway who starred in L\u00f8chen\u2019s 1959 film, The Chasers.<\/p>\n

Trier doesn\u2019t 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 B\u00f8rsum had seen her mother taken to a German camp, too. \u201cHer voice held a lot of weight for me,\u201d Trier said of his choice to include the 91-year-old actor. The film draws power from the subtle specificity; B\u00f8rsum\u2019s voice, low and knowing, comes suffused with an ineffable meaning. The viewer immediately feels encouraged to pay closer attention to the narration.<\/p>\n

These veiled decisions inform the movie Gustav eventually directs as well: He\u2019d wanted the shoot to take place inside Agnes and Nora\u2019s childhood home, but eventually settles for a reproduction on a back lot, a series of ceiling-less facades. A viewer wouldn\u2019t be able to tell that it\u2019s 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\u2014or just merely observe\u2014themselves is essential. \u201cI need to distance myself from the characters to be able to create them,\u201d Trier said. What\u2019s on-screen is akin to \u201ca counter-life,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt\u2019s not intended to say, \u2018Hey, look at me!\u2019 It\u2019s saying, \u2018I\u2019m doing this about something that\u2019s deeply personal, and yet I feel that it\u2019s over there.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cIt\u2019s like conversations with friends,\u201d Trier said. \u201cIf someone says, \u2018I sense around our latest coffees over the last year, that you talk a lot about this. What\u2019s the purpose?\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018What do you mean, purpose?\u2019\u201d He laughed. \u201cShit, I don\u2019t know. But I know I care about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Separating the art from the artist can be easier debated than done. In 1967, Roland Barthes infamously argued…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676016,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-676015","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115844033212100282","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}