Sentimental Value

I don’t believe in anything. Ham is good, I guess, and it’s cool when things are on fire. But I only like those things. I don’t believe in them.

Which is why I’m jealous of Joachim Trier. He seems to really believe in things! Believes the shit out of them. Believes with the passion of some kind of strudel-powered Danish believifying machine, one constructed entirely from Sincerity Steel, and paid for with grant money from the Dewy Eyes and Yearning Hearts Foundation.

Art is his focus this time around. If that sounds vague, that’s because it’s supposed to be – Trier likes casting his thematic net wide and messy. At a glance I’d say we’re dealing with art as a method of both expression and catharsis, but also exploring its therapeutic uses and how those uses are only ever a small step away from becoming a crutch, one with which you can hide from your true self, but paradoxically it’s also from within the safety of that same crutch we feel comfortable confronting the true self, assuming of course we don’t take advantage of our new condition of emotional obfuscation to shun the world outside and in its place craft our own narrative, inside of which we can hide even deeper still, which, let’s be honest, is probably what we’re going to do, irrespective of initial intent; however, it really might be that this Russian-nesting-doll approach is the very thing that gives birth to good art, and isn’t that what this is really all about – wait, no, no it isn’t, we’re trying to better understand ourselves through the power of storytelling, not mass-produce delusion and call it good product (are we even in the business of creating market-friendly products (is everything a product simply by being consumed (is it intent or reception, creator or audience, that decides the identity of a work, or is such a question inherently self-defeating?)?)?). Furthermore – holy shit, was that all one sentence? Kill me, kill me, you have to kill me (because perhaps it is only in death that we achieve our true self…)…

OK, so, Trier doesn’t give you something to chew on so much as he shoves an existential turducken down your throat and asks you how that big boy tastes. That’s fine. Everybody likes turducken. The new goal, then, is to keep things nice and simple.

We reset:

With great art comes great responsibility, so God help you if you’re a dick. You can use storytelling to either confront problems or hide from them, and your choice is probably going to be whichever you’ve been doing in real life. Take planet Earth’s worst father, Gustav. He’d rather live in a retelling of own his life as written by himself than deal with the real thing. In the film he’s making, one ostensibly about his own life, his daughter – a professional actor! – is played by another woman. What easier way to get the people in your life to act the way you want than to cast someone else to play them? Motherfucker doesn’t want expression or introspection, he wants control. There’s all sorts of nifty visuals to drive this point home – Gustav is always in black, Nora and Rachel are in opposite colors (black and white, respectively) during their only meeting, where they talk about the film Gustav is making. The lame-ass real daughter (decked out like her pops) is being replaced by the cleaner, purer, ideally more suggestible movie-daughter.

But it’s not that simple, because it’s never that fucking simple! Gustav actually does offer the role to his daughter before anyone else, in what she thinks is a cynical ploy to secure funding for the film. But it turns out he had the finances worked out beforehand, and he just sincerely wanted her to play the part.

So his intentions are noble, right? Hold your fucking horses, you heinous shit-monkey! Gustav wants his daughter to play a role in which her character commits suicide, because he strongly suspects that Nora has attempted it before (she has). Is he cynically trying to draw on her own personal torment for the sake of a good performance? Or is he connecting with his daughter the only way he knows how? Is he trying to dictate her own feelings to her, trying to control the real Nora’s emotions and perception of her own experiences by turning her into another one of his characters?

OK, so the upshot here –

I’m not done! It gets fucking weirder! The first time we see Gustav finally connect with a daughter instead of trying to control her it’s with his pretend movie-daughter. He comforts Rachel when she decides she can’t do the role justice and needs to pull out of the movie. Gustav reassures her that she is a fine actor, and a fine person. This is a level of humanity he has never shown to either of his two real daughters.

Except he has, because Agnes says that when she was a child and working with him on a film Gustav was real and present, genuinely engaged, and interested in her.

Get out of my fucking head, Trier, you precocious Danish warlock!

Honestly, if I have a knock against this movie it’s that the art-informing-life-informing-art-informing-life dynamic isn’t explored enough. Scenes that seem like they’re going to get nice and weird end up kind of stunted and sad-for-the-sake-of-emotion. There’s a scene where Nora collapses and cries in a bedroom, only for the camera to pull back into a wider shot in which it’s revealed that she’s on stage – maybe a play, maybe a teaching exercise, but the point is that she’s performing for an audience. After the reveal, the scene just ends, which is kind of scratching at the surface and then not bothering to go deeper. What if Nora had popped back up, suddenly cheery, and discussed her choices in that scene with the group of (let’s just say) students who were watching her? What was real? Is she pretending this is easy? Is she lying now, or lying when she appears distraught at other points in the film? Shit would’ve been deliciously fucking weird, but instead the scene just ends.

Also, not loving how Gustav gets everything he wants in the end. Nora acts in the film, his grandson acts in the film, both of his daughters seem to have forgiven him for the whole failed father thing, he’s making movies again, and everybody has just kind of accepted that dad can only connect through his art, so we should all be cool with his relentless shittiness. If that dude ran someone over with his car they’d probably apologize to him for ruining its resale value.

The End

Joachim Trier is the Death Star of being sad. He’s like if depression had a boss fight. But fuck me if the dedication with which he explores the intricacies of suffering – particularly the ways in which they are simultaneously revealed by and embedded in the stories we tell about them – doesn’t elevate his material above weepy-weepy Oscar-bait, way the fuck above it, into a kind of fascinatingly downbeat ouroboros that can’t stop swallowing its own tail, not until someone finally asks it why it keeps doing that, because that shit looks painful.

I can never truly love a movie that doesn’t have a single flamethrower in it, or a dinosaur that’s also a loose-cannon cop who plays by his own rules, but Trier’s sincere belief that the art of being a person is as legitimate and necessary a part of the whole human experience as the physical and spiritual ones is fascinating. Watching this movie is like meeting someone who truly believes that God is real (he isn’t) and also knows he is capable of proving that God is real (which he can’t, because God isn’t real).

I haven’t exactly been converted to the Church of Rad Feelings after watching Sentimental Value, but maybe I won’t roll my eyes and make jerk-off gestures anymore when I see super emotional posters and trailers during awards season. For a movie that doesn’t feature a single dinosaur cop melting people with a flamethrower, that’s not bad.