Sentimental Value

The second movie in my double feature at the Broadway yesterday was Sentimental Value.  I have been looking forward to this ever since it won the Grand Prix at Cannes earlier this year and I was definitely not disappointed.  Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) is a stage and television actress in Norway who, along with her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), is dismayed when her estranged father, celebrated director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard), reappears in her life after the death of her mother.  He is hoping to make a comeback with an autobiographical movie about his mother featuring a script written specifically for Nora.  She is angry with her father for abandoning her and turns down the role thinking that he is only using her to get financing.  When Hollywood actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) becomes enamored with him after seeing a retrospective of his work at the Deauville Film Festival, he offers her the role instead and they begin rehearsals in the house, which has been in his family for generations, where key moments in the script actually happened.  Rachel eventually realizes that she cannot do justice to the role because she has no connection to the character.  Nora finally reads the script and recognizes that the character is actually based on her and that her father wrote it as a way to reconcile with her.  This features incredibly powerful performances from Skarsgard and Reinsve and I was especially impressed by the scene in which Gustav first offers Nora the role because there is so much raw emotion simmering under the surface in their seemingly polite conversation (it is absolutely riveting).  Fanning is also great and I loved the juxtaposition between how Rachel delivers a line from the script in English and how Nora delivers the same line in Norwegian because it is immediately apparent that the role was written for the latter.  The house in which Gustav, Nora, and Agnes grew up is used as a character to represent all of the memories that keep them in a dysfunctional relationship and it is remodeled throughout the narrative to depict the possibility of a fresh start.  This is a brilliant exploration of the power of art to heal and I highly recommend it.