Sentimental Value - Film of the Year 2025

 

It was my last film of the year. The 27th December at Cineworld in Hemel Hempstead. No sign of it showing at my local Odeon over the Christmas holidays. Sentimental Value is a Norwegian movie from director Joachim Trier. I loved his previous film The Worst Person in the World, and it's lead actress Renate Reinsve is here again. She plays Nora, the estranged daughter of Stellan Skarsgard's Gustav Borg, a famous film director now aging and wanting his actress daughter for his last film. She turns him down. He has returned to the family home which, as Molly Haskell describes in the Winter Edition of Sight and Sound magazine, is "a character in it's own right".

Sophie Monks Kaufman in the same publication says that Stellan "gives the performance of his life" with the "agony of the man at the end of his own career".  Although I had to disagree when she says he's so different "prancing on a sun drenched beach". He was drunk again.  But this does not hide the fact that he is a horrible person. What kind of man is he who cannot watch other people's films? He makes anyone he meets feel like they are the most important person he has ever met, before discarding them for the next. But I have not seen better from an actor in 2025. An Oscar awaits. There is a scene with his other daughter Agnes ( a subtle performance from Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas) is so predictable it makes you angry. Fortunately she is not taken in. 

When her father moved to Sweden for good when they were children, it was Inga who helped her sister so much and the two remain close. And it's actually Nora who carries the movie (also an awards contender). Then there is Rachel Kemp played by Elle Fanning, an important and successful actress that Gustav decides to cast in the role he had planned for Nora.

When I thought that the ending was going to be set in the house that has been in the family for generations, as the director had planned, we finally find it was a film set. (Molly Haskell mistakenly told us it was their "house as both home and sound stage"). But after filming the very last scene of his movie, it's Stellan's reaction to his daughter's performance that says everything about his life and regret about those missing years. But can he change?

The film has already won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival (the winner of the Palme d'Or was political and one I will avoid). It has also won the best international independent film at the British Independent Film Awards and lots at other minor festivals. Awaiting the Golden Globes later in January and then the Oscars.

There is one interesting article on Kodak's Motion Picture Website about how "DP Kasper Tuxen DFF harnessed Kodak Film" as the cinematographer had for The Worst Person in the World. Both films were shot on 35mm film, unlike the modern use of digital film.