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| Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinste in Sentimental Value. (Photo: Neon.) |
The house that provides the key setting in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a real beauty – a late 19th-century Oslo domicile in a Norwegian style known as Dragonstil (“dragon style”) that looks like a candy house, built of dark blue wood with cherry trim and a gabled roof. (In real life it’s called Villa Filipstad and belongs to Lars Lillo-Stenberg.) Luxuriously lit by Kasper Tuxen Andersen, it’s the most gorgeous house at the center of a movie since the gracious country residence in Olivier Assayas’s 2008 Summer Hours, loaded with the art made and collected by Edith Scob’s uncle, which she leaves to her three grown children when she dies early in the film. That picture could also have been called Sentimental Value; like Trier’s it’s about legacy, but of a different kind. Sentimental Value is about a famous filmmaker, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), who inherited the house from his aunt; she lived there after Borg’s mother, a Resistance fighter during the Second World War who was imprisoned and tortured by the SS, hanged herself in it. When Borg and his wife divorced, his wife got it in the settlement, and now his younger daughter Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) occupies it with her husband and young son. Agnes and her sister Nora (Renate Reinsve) identify it with their childhood and especially with their mother, a therapist who has recently died of cancer. We see in a flashback that as kids they used to listen to her sessions with her patients through an old stove that carried their voices up to the second floor. Gustav, now seventy, wants to make a comeback film in this house, and he’s anxious for Nora, a well-known actress, to play the lead, a woman he insists is not based on his mother but whose story bears significant resemblance to her. Borg plans to end the movie with the protagonist’s suicide, by the same means and even in the same room as his mother’s. (When he makes the dramatic claim that she’ll even kick aside the same chair his mother did, Agnes comments quietly to her sister that the chair that now occupies that room came from IKEA.)