the end of the struggle
by Douglas Messerli
Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier (screenplay), Joachim Trier
(director) Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value) / 2025
After characterizing at least 4 of the 2026 Oscar
nominees (all films from 2025) as works representing life as a battlefield, I realized
that Joachim Trier’s powerful film Sentimental Value could also be seen
as representing “one battle after another.” But here instead of being performed
on a large-scale cultural battleground, the struggles occur within—within the
self and family, not generally publicly enacted but privately experienced, often
without words. Although the Borg family are all basically employed in jobs that
entail the use of public language—the mother, Sissel Borg, who has just died as
the movie opens, was a psychotherapist, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) is a
noted filmmaker, the eldest daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) a respected actor,
and the younger daughter Agnes borg Pettersen (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) is an
historian—they live as do so many characters of Scandinavian theater and film
they live concealed lives, unable to fully express their emotions and problems
to others. One might argue that condition is a given in most of Bergman’s films
and Ibsen’s plays, for example.
As surely
Agnes knows better than anyone else in this film, history is hidden in this
world and even the lovely red-painted Oslo home which has been in the Borg
family for several generations, and in which Gustav’s mother, arrested and
tortured as an underground agent during the Nazi control of Norway, committed
suicide, and in which her lesbian sister* later partied, turning up the music
when the neighbor’s complained, convinced that it was one of them who had called
the Gestapo on her sister, is in decay.
But it is also a house of wonderful
memories for the two sisters, Nora and Agnes, who during the fighting battles
between their parents—ending in their divorce and Gustav disappearing from the
girls’ lives—formed a close bond of dependence. The house, in fact, almost
becomes another character in this comedic-drama, as the narrative voice I
presume to be Nora’s commenting, the house prefers its endless family noises to
the quietude that has, over the years, descended upon it.
Her father later paints it white and refurbishes it
into a modern gray and vacuous domain.
After a
scene that establishes one of Nora’s major phobias, a terrible case of stage
freight that sometimes creates almost a melodrama behind the curtain before she
is able to go on for her insightful performances, quietude once more descends
upon the house, as the two daughters host a respectful after-funeral party.
Here we also meet Agnes’s husband Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud) and
another central figure to this work, their delightful young son Erik (Øyvind
Hesjedal), who loves his aunt Nora so much that he even proposes marriage to
her—when he grows up, an offer so innocent and beautiful that it almost chokes
up the actress who, although she is having an affair currently with a theater
colleague, Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie), clearly has been unable to sustain
relationships.
Although
Agnes might have imagined that she and her family might have remained there,
what most troubles the two daughters is not that he might now sell it, but that
he has so suddenly bounced back into their lives after having so emptied it.
Agnes, with her historical perspective and given the fact that as a young child
she appeared in one of his best films, a time in which she was able to truly
bond with him, has a much healthier relationship with Gustav than does Nora, a
sensitive being who he has basically ignored, claiming that he cannot he bear
to watch theater and accordingly has missed almost all of her performances over
the years.
Both women are angry and hurt, but Nora, in
particular, not only turns him down but quietly berates him for his
selfishness, for being a man whose only foci in life are the various casts in
the films he is currently shooting. For his part, Gustav excuses his behavior by
claiming he is, afterall, a great artist who cannot be bound by the typical familial
conventions.
It is, of
course, for these very reasons why Sissel has divorced him and sent him
spinning off into a world of fame, while she has remained responsible enough to
raise their daughters alone.
We can
see the problems Nora and, to a lesser degree Agnes face are generational in
their development, a young boy having been betrayed by a mother, the mother’s
sister positioning herself somewhat outside of the general culture in sexual relationship,
and the boy turned into a selfish, seemingly disinterested father. He does not
even know, apparently, of Nora’s own suicide attempt.
Director Joachim
Trier gives Agnes a significant role in this film, particularly since she later
visits the National Archives of Norway to read about her grandmother’s
statements of her torture, her mother never having revealed them to any of her
family members; and it is Agnes who first strongly summarizes her father’s
intrusion into their life when he attempts, behind her back, to engage her son
Erik to play the young boy in the movie (just as she has previously played a
young girl in another film). Yet central links of this heritage of suffering
are Karin, Gustav, and Nora, those whom one might describe are the true
carriers of the familiar and cultural rejection and the suffering which
results. None of them can fully express their pain and rid themselves of their
ghosts Even visits to psychiatrists only remind the remaining survivors of
Sissel’s, Gustav’s wife’s occupation. And Agnes’ role of the conciliator can
only go so far.
After Nora rejects the role of playing her
father’s central character, Gustav accidentally encounters the US movie star Rachel
Kemp (Elle Fanning) at the Deauville American Film Festival, who has been
particularly touched by seeing an earlier film, the one with Agnes as the
child, of Borg’s career. What his family see as his failures, she perceives as
the innate qualities of a good director, the focus only at one who is at hand
and those engaged with him at moment; and when she hears of his new project, she
is only too happy to take on the role of Karin.
With her
signed, Neflix is ready to produce the work, allowing Borg to imagine a new
impetus for his end-career vision. He insists on using his usual
cinematographer, Peter (Lars Väringer), now retired; but when he visits Peter
to offer him the job he his startled by his colleague’s now frail health, and
is even more frustrated by the producer’s attempt to interfere with his
choices. In Peter, obviously, he recognizes what he himself may soon be facing.
Although
he works carefully with Rachel in explaining the script and setting out scene
after scene, even translating the full work into English since she cannot speak
Norwegian, she herself gradually begins to see problems with her abilities to
comprehend and express the character he has created. Why does a woman with a
young child suddenly lock herself away to destroy her and surely her son’s life?
But, obviously, that is the very question for which Gustav is seeking an answer.
She also
senses that she is just not right for the role, particularly when he orders her
to dye her blonde hair to match that of Nora’s. And finally, she meets up with
Nora herself, attempting to explain to the increasingly prickly daughter, even
more angry now that her father has seemed to find someone to replace her, the doubts
about her ability to properly play the role and her frustrations in deciphering
the essence of the text.
The acting of all the characters in this work
is of the highest quality, each of them given full roles to explore their
characters. But what Matt Bullions, writes in the Salt Lake Film Review about
Fanning is particularly telling about the artistry of Trier’s cinema:
“…Strangely enough, Elle Fanning delivers one of the
film’s best performances as the American actress who comes into Gustav’s
project after Nora has declined it. Fanning is always great, no question, but
it would be easy for this script to paint her as silly or as the dumb American,
but her character is awarded the same empathy as everyone else. She’s not some
kind of flaky coastal flibbertigibbet, she’s a professional who’s serious about
the work she’s doing. And the more attached she becomes to these people, the
more that’s emotionally at stake for her, and Fanning plays this remarkably
well.”
After
having investigated her grandmother’s prison experiences, Agnes finally forces herself
to read her father’s script, realizing what Rachel has begun to suspect, that this
work is not totally about Gustav’s mother Karin but about the nexus I earlier
mentioned. This film is as much about Gustav’s failure to love and explain his
behavior to Nora as Karin was unable to provide to her son. Just as the suicide
at film’s end is an expression of Karin’s own failed attempts to express her
pain and horror, Agnes beings to suspect her father sensed that his own edler
daughter has attempted such an act for the very same reasons.
The two
sisters lie down in bed and hug to re-express their deep commitment to one
another, Agnes finally admitting to her sister, with great wisdom, “But we didn’t
have the same childhood; I had you.”
Putting away
her resentment, even her fears, Nora takes on the role that Rachel felt unable
to portray, the last scene of the film, which we have seen described earlier,
now performed the way it surely was meant to be: the woman saying goodbye to
her son (now played by Erik) before turning back and entering into the room
where she hangs herself. As Gustaf explained early on to Rachel, we do not see
the act, we only hear the stool on which she stool being kicked away.
But this
time Gustav quietly praises the scene with the words, “Perfect,” as Nora looks
at him with a rewarding smile. We don’t hear a stool being kicked away; of
course that might happen in the editing of the film, but perhaps it has also
been cut, Gustav himself refusing to repeat the terrible act now corrected by
his late admission of love to his own daughter and his grandson.
As Rolling
Stone reviewer David Fear nicely expressed it, in this film we get
something that can’t simply be classified as another “dysfunctional family
drama.”
“Sentimental Value is essentially a double
act between Skarsgård and Reinsve, and these two performers play off each other
in a way that’s recognizable to anyone who’s struggled with paternal baggage,
by which we mean everybody. It’s also using the prickly dynamic between father
and daughter to explore how storytelling can both mask hurt and facilitate
healing, and doing so in a way that goes way beyond heroes and villains. Not
even a meta ending that pushes that idea to its logical breaking point can sour
you on it. What you’re left with is one the best movies about how family means
always having to say your sorry — and why, in the end, it’s better to forgive
than forget.”
Trier’s
film was awarded the Grand Prix at The Cannes Film Festival in 2025.
*One of the reasons I watched this truly wonderful
film was that I had heard that it featured a lesbian character. I watched this
film through with complete enjoyment and wonderment, and upon finishing
realized that I had absolutely no memory of a lesbian scene. At first I was
convinced that the source material had simply misunderstood the sisterly hug
and expression of mutual commitment as a lesbian scene. But then I remembered a
narrative moment in the film describing the house’s previous tenants and returning
to the scene saw quite clearly a couple of full on kisses of Gustav’s aunt and
her lesbian friend. I realized that I have now seen so many queer films that I
has simply not noticed it as an expression of anything but enjoyment and love,
and had been totally unable to even recognize as anything out of the ordinary.
Isn’t this what we of the LGBTQ community have been seeking all along? When
even the gay historian becomes blind to the idea of exceptionalness or
something being “out of the ordinary,” then perhaps we truly have made
progress. But, I suspect, for the average heterosexual viewer this would have
been greeted still with wide-eyed awareness of something odd and different is
going on in this scene. I have to say, with “queerish” events occur in so very
many of the Oscar nominated movies, one might happily grow blind regarding
sexual difference. Perhaps I am fortunate that this year as long determined to
be the last year in which I explored queer experience in film. Soon, we may see
it in almost any film without blinking an eye.
Los Angeles, March 15, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March
2026).
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