Richard Brooks | In Cold Blood / 1967 || Bennett Miller | Capote/ 2005 || Douglas McGrath | Infamous / 2006

capote’s cold blood

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Brooks (screenwriter, based on the work by Truman Capote) In Cold Blood / 1967

Dan Futterman (screenplay, based on Gerald Clarke’s Capote: A Biography), Bennett Miller (director) Capote / 2005

Douglas McGrath (screenwriter, based on George Plimpton’s Truman Capote, and director) Infamous / 2006

 

After the release of the 2005 film Capote, and before I even knew of the existence of a second film, I planned on writing an essay on the author and his novel of 1965, and had shared my interest and reading activities (I reread In Cold Blood soon after viewing Capote) with several friends. When I mentioned to my friend, writer Wendy Walker that I was planning this piece, she quickly responded: “Well, of course, that’s where it all began!”

     One might normally have questioned the pronoun of her sentence: what did she mean by “it?” But I knew from the context of our conversation that what she was referring to was not just the new journalistic writings of figures such as Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and others that followed Capote’s work, but that she was implicating all the journalistic lies and half-truths—from the fraudulent writings of Stephen Glass in The New Republic of the late 1990s to the exaggerated (and untrue) pre-war reports on Iraq by Judith Miller and the fictitious reports the Bush administration planted in the White House news room—events which increasingly have given rise to a distrust of the American media.

     Capote’s highly acclaimed work about the murders by Dick Hickok and Perry Smith of the Holcomb, Kansas, Clutter family in 1959 was advertised, at least, as a novel, a work of fiction. But Capote’s own claims that his “non-fiction novel” was “immaculately factual” and that he was able to recall “with 95% absolute accuracy” the conversations he had had with police, local citizens, and the criminals themselves all suggested to readers of the time that what they were reading were artfully arranged “facts.”

      From the very beginning Capote faced criticism for his so-called new genre (obviously writers such as Twain and Hemingway, to name only a couple, had done such work earlier, without describing it as journalism) by writers such as John Hersey, who admittedly wrote in works such as Hiroshima about fictional information descriptively, but who felt that in the case of In Cold Blood the “fictionist decidedly had the upper hand over the journalist.” A year after the publication of the book, Phillip K. Tompkins returned to the small Kansas town to interview several of Capote’s sources, discovering in the process that some locals felt that Capote had extensively embroidered upon events and personalities and, in a few instances, had actually lied. In particular, Josephine Meier, the wife of Holcomb undersheriff—whose apartment contained the “ladys’ cell” in which Perry Smith was incarcerated—contradicted several aspects of Capote’s telling.

      Through several chapters in the novel, Capote suggests that Mrs. Meir and Perry had grown close over Smith’s imprisonment, that she had cooked several special dishes for him and sat talking with him at length. To Tompkins, Meir reported, contrarily, that she had spent little time with Smith and had not communicated very much. After the local trial, In Cold Blood notes of Mrs. Meir:

 

“….after everybody had gone, and I’d started to wash some dishes—

I heard him [Smith] crying. I turned on the radio. Not to hear him.

He’d never broke down before, shown any sign of it. Well, I went

to him. The door of his cell. He reached out his hand. He wanted me

to hold his hand, and I did, I held his hand, and all he said was “I’m

embraced by shame.”

 

     Meir denied both that she had heard Smith cry and that she had held his hand. Certainly, the passage is a moving one that helps the reader to sympathize with Capote’s anti-hero Perry Smith, but if the actual player is to be believed, the events were fictional.

     One does not need to know the facts, however, to perceive that Capote’s work is stuffed with literary devices. Throughout the book Capote observes his figures from an Olympian position that I would argue betrays his fictional approach to reality. Reporting Herb Clutter’s activities, for example, on the day of Clutter’s death, the author ends the chapter:

 

“Then, touching the brim of his cap, he headed for home and the day’s

work, unaware that it would be his last.”

 

The device may be dramatically effective, but it is also a hollow one: do most of us foresee the moment of our deaths? How could Capote know that Clutter touched the brim of his hat?

      Similarly, Capote often provides reams of “facts” that, no matter how long he had talked with the two criminals and no matter how much they had remembered and revealed to him, seem unlikely information to which the author was privy. As the two murderers share a meal at a Kansas City diner, Capote writes:

 

“Dick ordered another hamburger. During the past few days he’d known a

hunger that nothing—three successive steaks, a dozen Hershey bars, a pound

of gumdrops—seemed to interrupt. Perry, on the other hand, was without

appetite; he subsisted on root beer, aspirin, and cigarettes.”

 

    One could believe that Capote was told of Perry’s eating and smoking patterns, but not that he would have known of the precise culinary intake of Dick Hickok. Are we really to believe, moreover, that even in Perry Smith’s extensive interviews with the author revealed the sexual of Hickok conversations in bed with a Mexican woman: “As though reciting a rosary, Dick incessantly whispered ‘Is it good, baby? Is it good?’” These, I argue, are the details of a fiction, a romance, not of an “immaculately factual” work.

     One might trace the character of Perry Smith, in fact, back to Capote’s 1950 story, “The Diamond Guitar,” in which a prisoner, Mr. Schaeffer, encounters a young eighteen-year-old guitar player, Tico Feo, befriending his fellow inmate and together planning their escape from the highway gang in which they work. A deep homoerotic relationship—although it remains asexual—develops between the two, as they imagine a world outside their prison quite similar to the one which Perry imagines in Mexico with Dick Hickok. Soon after their escape, they are recaptured, and Tico Feo is killed in the fray.

      For Capote the real murderer—a man who shared the author’s shortness of stature and his sense of a displaced childhood—became a perfect romantic figure with whom, as the movie Infamous makes quite clear and Capote more discreetly hints, he apparently fell in love.

     Both films focus their attentions on the distance between Capote’s sense of truth—Capote begins with the author boasting that he “is always honest”—and the reality of his life. Both works also suggest, as I have mentioned, that there was more than a journalistic relationship between Capote and Smith; and both works present the author as a figure who betrayed the murderers while he was simultaneously manipulating them to reveal the minute details of their lives. Capote and Infamous both counter Capote’s outrageousness—his absolute freakishness within the Kansas society of the ordinary—with Capote’s childhood friend, the novelist Harper Lee, played brilliantly by Catherine Kenner and even more intelligently represented in Infamous by Sandra Bullock (reputedly turned down for the same role in the earlier film). Given the exaggeration of Capote’s personality, Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays the author in a respectfully impish manner, while Toby Jones’ acting in Infamous perhaps gets closer to the actual man. In all these respects, both movies concern themselves with the intimately painful gaps in Capote’s life between his persona and his “true” being, both arguing that the moral gaps helped to destroy his writing and resulted in his early death.

     In the end Infamous seems to me to be the superior film, simply because it spends less time on the glorification (generally self-glorification) of Capote’s supposed talents, instead revealing the shallow and hostile context of his social life, filled with gossipy luncheons with his “swans,” Babe Paley, Diana Vreeland, Slim Keith, and others—a world in which each attacked the others behind their backs.

    In a social world at the opposite end of these glamorous New York scenes, Hickok and Smith had also been victims—of their parents, friends, jails, the American economy—and so too would Capote, in turn, victimize them. Perhaps the most shocking and yet revelatory scene of Infamous occurs when Perry Smith (stunningly performed by the current James Bond, Daniel Craig) turns the tables, so to speak, threatening Capote with rape. His howl of the unrighteous reminds one of the later outrage of many of Capote’s wealthy “swan” friends when he attempted later to publish his satiric work Unanswered Prayers—using his wealthy friends as the source of his characters. Obviously the significant difference between those who felt betrayed by Capote is that the “swans” could easily survive their “metaphoric” slaughter, while Smith and Hickok—despite Capote’s legal attempts on their behalf—ended with ropes about their necks and their actual deaths.

     In short, both of these films center on Capote himself and his inability, in the end, to know whether he was living in the “real” world or in a world of his imagination; perhaps to him there was no difference. So too does Capote, even in the bravura of his writing, call as much attention to his literary feats as to his sympathetically portrayed killers who sought out the American dreams their victims and the author had attained.

     In hindsight, perhaps the most poignant and intelligent of films on this subject was Richard Brooks’ 1967 film In Cold Blood, shot in gritty black and white. True, Brooks often banally psychologizes his figures, but here we finally come to comprehend how Smith (convincingly portrayed by actor Robert Blake, later tried for his own murder) and Hickok, locked in a homoerotic relationship hidden even from themselves, became the perfect killing machine. Smith saves Clutter’s daughter Nancy from rape only to slit her father’s throat, unleashing a fury of pent-up love and hate. In that respect, we have to grant that Capote knew a good story when he saw one. Violence is seldom a singular act, and in the American experience we might say it is nearly always a cultural event. At the end of In Cold Blood, the self-confessed murderer cannot even comprehend his own connection to the events; not only does he fail to recognize the absurd contradictions of his statements (“I thought Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman… I thought so right up to the time I cut his throat.”), but he is unable to perceive his place in the society at large as part of the human race (“I’d like to apologize, but who to?”).

     We realize that author and characters alike could no longer comprehend the effects of their acts upon others or the effects of the acts of others upon their own lives. Capote and his characters became victims of their own creations, frozen in their mix of ego, alcohol, and drugs.

     Joanne Carson recalls reading one of the unpublished chapters of Unanswered Prayers, “And Audrey Wilder Sang”:

 

“It’s about Hollywood, and the beautiful people of Hollywood and New

York, and how they’re not beautiful. There was one vivid scene where

a woman is talking on the phone in a business office and somebody jumps

off the roof above and goes past and she just continues talking.”

 

Los Angeles, December 18, 2006

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2006).

 

Luca Silver | The Naked Eye / 2021

i’ll be watching you

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luca Silver (screenplay and director) The Naked Eye / 2021 [15 minutes]

 

In a room bathed by yellow light, lies a handsome young man (Luca Silver) in his black undershorts. The room is lined by boxes, suggesting that he is either just moving in and has failed to unpack or is soon to leave the space. Ghosts of entwined male couples seem to be hovering over the space.

     Suddenly, the sleeping man’s eyes open. Has he spotted something? He, however, quickly falls back to sleep, but quickly is awakened again by what seems to be a figure. He soon realizes, however, it is nothing and stands on this seemingly hot night to run his hands across his torso, pull off his underpants revealing his half-erection, and even turn to the camera to seemingly demonstrate his butt—all the time fondling himself in erotic devotion.

 

      He returns to the bed, but just as suddenly does spot a figure and soon after witnesses, as we do, the shadow of a man (Michael Stewart) standing against the closed blinds, desperate to see what is within and enter. If previously we have heard nothing but the whir of the fan, we now the shadow’s fingers rubbing across glass, in full lust of the now covered and somewhat frightened young beauty in the bed.

      We cannot comprehend who this figure might be, a man alive or one of the vague ghosts we sense to be within the room. We even must ask ourselves if this figure is an emblem of our own lust for the man we have just previously witnessed entirely naked.

       In the next scene the room has turned to blue suggesting the light of early morning. Our lovely sleeper rises and enters the shower where we watch, apparently from an impossible view behind a glass encasement of the shower, the face of another young man who licks the glass, steamed up with the evaporation of the water’s heat, with his tongue to gain eye-level entry to the man within.

      In the next moment we see the shower from the traditional view, with five blue towels hanging over a black shower, all apparently used. In full blue and yellow, we witness only the arms reaching high above the glass as the young man soaps and washes his hair. He pulls down one of the blue towels.

     Is this our own erotic dream or that of the young man? We no longer are able to separate the two. We only perceive that we are now shut out as the credits role, our desires disappointed and put to rest. Has the young man all along been taunting us or whoever it is who so desperately wishes to watch him in his daily actions? Is he leaving became of the ghosts or inviting them in?

      This short film raises issues of voyeurism, pornography, and exhibitionism and our relationship to them without providing us with any coherent answers.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

Casper Andreas | Ett sista farväl (A Last Farewell) / 2013

the intolerable silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casper Andreas (screenwriter and director) Ett sista farväl (A Last Farewell) / 2013 [13 minutes]

Erik (Tomas von Brömssen) is an angry old man. We first see him sitting at his computer, but unable to write, irritated with the of his daughter, Malin (Liv Mjönes). She is pregnant, but he is cruelly dismissive of her, lecturing her even for asking if he has some herbal tea since she’s not supposed to drink coffee. 

    He is rude her, impatient for her to be gone.

   All of this seems difficult to explain until she reveals that she has just been to her papa’s gravesite, which Erik has evidently failed to visit.

   And gradually we begin to realize that Malin is the daughter of two gay men, one of whom, Leif (Iwar Wiklander). We also begin to perceive that his anger with Malin is that she has bought the pills Leif requested to take his own life. How could she do that to his own lover, her own papa?

    The rudeness continues until she is forced to leave. And suddenly we now realize another reason why Erik desires to be left alone. In her absence he begins a conversation with his dead companion, furious with him for having committed suicide so that he might no longer suffer from the disease which would kill him in a few months.

     Erik argues that he would have looked after him, cared for him and, despite Leif’s suggestion to the contrary, he would not have felt put upon, would have gladly nursed his husband into his grave.

    Leif continues to argue that is not Malin fault for doing what he asked. Yes, he admits, he did not end his life for Erik’s sake, but for himself, he was in pain and afraid. And the decision he made was a selfish but necessary one.

     Moreover, he counsels Erik, he cannot be angry with Malin for the rest of his life. Surely he will be delighted with the grandson, unable to resist loving the child.

     Speaking to the vision of Leif in a chair, he suddenly realizes that it is empty, and that he now lives alone even though he will always sense Leif’s presence in his life. Leif’s voice suggests he somehow go back to writing, about the two of them and Malin, that he find a way to say farewell.

     Before she has even returned home Erik calls his daughter asking if she might accompany him to the grave the next morning. The healing has begun.

     This lovely short Swedish film reveals what all gay men who have been in a long relationship must surely feel with the death of the other. In this case, Erik has a daughter they shared. If I were to survive Howard, or were Howard to survive me, the utter loneliness would be nearly unbearable, the sense of emptiness profound and debilitating just as it is for Erik. We have both willed our bodies to a research center, so there will not even be a grave to visit to symbolically say goodbye.

    At least Erik will son the voice of a crying grandson in the house and perhaps live long enough to speak to him and share with him his love of his other grandfather. Without that the silence will be nearly intolerable. I am certain I will fill the room with meaningless conversations to Howard until death silences me as well.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

Douglas Messerli | Battlefields / 2025 [Introduction]

battlefields

by Douglas Messerli

 

It was fascinating to me that in March of 2026, at the very moment the US President had almost single-handedly taken a nation to war—with the help, of course, of the Israeli militarists who have long been seeking to find a major world power to help them wipe out one of their most potent enemies without any stated reason except for his personal dislike of the Iranian government, and, most importantly, having received not a single congressional vote or any evidence of major support from the citizens—that four of the titles I first saw were all about doing large-scale battle on national landscapes.

     For Ryan Coogler’s Sinners the war involved an uprising of Mississippi Delta blacks simply seeking out their private enjoyment after their long days of working the cotton fields, interrupted by Irish vampires, serving as a threat of assimilation and destruction to their culture, and ending in an outright rebellion of the last survivor against the Ku Klux Klan, emblem of the white bigotry that had destroyed so many black lives for centuries. If it was a valiant fight, it was alas, as history has shown, a losing battle.

    So too did blacks and whites lead a rebellion this time against the political right and wealthy industrialists in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Here a Weatherman-like radical group, the fictional French 75, worked, often successful, to free immigrants detained by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), blew up corporation headquarters, and robbed banks to sustain their activities. The military right of the US came down upon them with full force,

almost totally silencing them. Yet their worst enemy was simply time, as the first generation of radicals grew into middle age, and drugged and drank themselves into oblivion. Yet even hidden away in a small California town, the “hero” and his daughter still came under siege, in this case because of a personal vendetta by one of the military rightists who having fathered a black child and who was seeking entry to one of the most elite racist organizations that made even the Klan look like a small town operation. If “Rocketman” Paul Calhoun / now renamed Bob Ferguson is not precisely an innocent, his daughter Charlene/Willa (the offspring actually of the mad military racist Lockjaw) is guilty of nothing but existing; and the new battles that all must suffer this time round are simply those of protecting the future from the brutal hate Lockjaw and the American industrial complex represent.

       Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent focuses in on another national landscape, that of Brazil under the 1970s military dictatorship, filled with corrupt police forces and spiteful industrial chieftains who, almost in reverse of One Struggle After Another, turn innocent researchers, outspoken women, immigrants, gay people and others into rumored political dissidents so they might have recourse to murder them. Unlike the former political activists hiding out with new identities in a safe town in California, the stragglers who have made it to the underground safe house in Recife have done nothing but attempt to live good everyday lives, only to find themselves described as Communists, queers, and other kinds of outsiders who must be destroyed to save the fascist government. The battles they must undergo are daily struggles just to survive, and, in the end, that survival also entails the next generation, since they will surely lose out in the complex plots against their living.

     Finally, in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, the young hero of the work seems to be battling the entire nation, his working-class Jewish family and neighbors, bigoted Southern whites, a mafioso figure, and the affluent elites—as well as the worldwide Table Tennis Association—just to get his chance at the American dream of becoming the world ping-pong champion. One by one he wards them off only to also get caught up with a man who describes himself as a vampire. And like the others I describe above, Marty realizes that despite all of his desperate battles, his dream also represents a lost cause, having finally been defeated by the powerful forces which control his world.

      All of these works, every one of them representing moral individuals who attempt to defeat the evil forces of self-interest, greed, and hate, lose most of their battles, recognizing that in the worlds that they inhabit they will always be outsiders. And, accordingly, all four of these works contain, as James R Dubro has described them, “queerish” figures. Vampires, by their very definition, represent in their attraction to all sexes for a source of blood, serve as stand-ins for bisexual or queer individuals, desiring to consume and take over the bodies of both males and females with whom they come in contact. The number of male on male bodies in Sinners alone suggests a bloody orgy more than zombies feasting on the living. And in Marty Supreme the vampire pen manufacturer is more interested in actually paddling the behind of the young Marty that in getting behind him in support of his table tennis career.

      Some of the first for whom militarists and fascists come when pretending to crack down on “so-called” moral turpitude (usually a cover for their own truly immoral behaviors) are members of the LGBTQ community, actions which in The Secret Service are satirized by the press by describing them as attacks of the hairy leg now on the loose after having been found hanging from the jaws of a tiger shark.

    In One Battle After Another the younger generation for which the central figure fights, Charlene/Willa may have found a way to escape the sexual and gender-related predatoriness that dominates the older generation by refusing to define themselves and their friends in those terms, arguing for their own non-binary categories.

     The sad thing that keep haunting me, however, while watching all four of these films was that we come out of the theater facing no more of a morally defined world than when we entered. In one of their cases, no matter how many battle these heroes won, they lost the war, being outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the forces of evil.

     Leaving the theater I still had to return home to the news of Trump and his numerous minions in government and across my nation who were ready to whip up a chaos of divisiveness and hatred instead of seeking to serve a united people with empathy, care, and hope.

     There was a reason, I believe, behind the selection of his year’s best film by the American Film Academy being One Battle After Another and the Cannes Film Festival chose Mendonça Filho as best director. These films revealed the battles that most of us were engaged in now almost every day of our lives.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2026).

 

Joachim Trier | Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value) / 2025

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.

     Into this fraught situation, after years of absence, comes charging Gustav, who as usual given his narcissistic behavior, has missed the funeral, but is now ready to take over the home which he still owns.

     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.

     But now suddenly Gustav is not only returned home, but wants to use the house in his next film, after what has clearly been a dry period in his creativity. Not only that, he has written a script, purportedly based on events in his mother’s life (the one who had sweetly kissed her child goodbye before hanging herself), but wants Nora to play her own grandmother Karin!

     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.

   Agnes, having for days been unable to contact her sister, finally visits her, bringing with her the script for Nora to read, and even demanding that together they play out a particular scene which reveals the fusion of Karin and Nora.

   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).