Film Review #181: Sentimental Value

A polyphonic experience

In the writing room with fellow director and screenwriter Eskil Vogt, with whom Sentimental Value marks their sixth theatrical collaboration, Trier tends to approach scenes as if the film were an album. This approach is perhaps most apparent in their previous feature, The Worst Person in the World, which is divided explicitly into 14 parts: a prologue, 12 chapters, and an epilogue. Each scene functions like an individual song, focusing on specific moments and relationships in protagonist Julie’s life (also played by Renate Reinsve), together painting a complete picture of Julie’s journey through love, adulthood, and self-discovery.

While Trier departs from this formal structure in Sentimental Value, he turns to the use of segmented blackouts as a key element of the film’s narrative style. Through this technique, scenes upon scenes accumulate to reveal the histories of the house and its occupants. This musicality in the film’s movement between characters and time creates what Trier himself describes as a polyphonic experience, one in which fragmentation paradoxically guides the viewer towards a deeper sense of continuity and intimacy than a more narrowly subjective, single-character perspective would offer.

At the same time, Trier has characterised this film as his attempt to go acoustic, stripping down the cinematic apparatus such that the camera dissolves into the scene, thereby creating a sense of direct, unmediated intimacy with the actors. The film’s elliptical and fragmented first half, with a series of abrupt cut-to-blacks, therefore serves as a deliberate counterpoint, momentarily shifting into a more objective mode through Gustav’s movie footage and essayistic detours on the house’s memories (listen to Joachim Trier reflect more on this here). In doing so, a productive contrast between the distance of memory and the closeness of the present is preserved, allowing the film to approach its characters with an unfiltered closeness while still retaining the larger polyphonic perspective that gives their shared histories and inherited traumas its resonance.

Musicality in the craft

This musicality seeps into the way Trier works behind the camera. Beyond the almost musical-like rehearsals he conducts with his actors, designed to work through the script, shape new moments, and help the actors inhabit their characters before filming begins, Trier relies on what actor and long-time collaborator Anders Danielsen Lie has coined “jazz takes”. Borrowing from the freedom and responsiveness of jazz, these looser, improvisational versions of a scene allow the actors to see where things go, following whatever feels most authentic or emotionally true in the moment.

In Sentimental Value, this unfolds in a crucial scene between the two sisters. After Agnes finally convinces Nora to read the screenplay written by Gustav, the pair have an intimate conversation by the bed. The sequence drifts into an unscripted ending in which Agnes climbs onto the bed, hugs Nora, and tells her she loves her, a line which Nora returns with some difficulty. These takes enable the actors to continually search within themselves for a deeper emotional honesty, a sincerity that carries through their performances and gives Trier’s work its distinct, lived-in, and heartfelt warmth.