I Can’t Feel My Dad’s Love, and I Won’t. But I Know It’s There: An Essay on ‘Sentimental Value’

“Everyone’s mad at dad, huh?”

There’s a lot trapped within the Borg house. (Literal) writing on the wall, domestic disputes of years past, Nazi torture and its generational consequences — all built on a faulty foundation which comes to a head in Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value.” 

Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) has long since left the house and its burdens behind before the film begins. He’s a director, once renowned, whose acclaim is fading and must now make a final attempt to stay in the spotlight or risk losing the only thing he has going for him — an ailing career that he gave up everything for. So he writes a screenplay intended for his eldest, Nora (Renate Reinsve), to star in despite her paralysing stage fright. And he’s somehow surprised when she declines. 

“Sentimental Value” is at times terrifying because it is true. Nora knows Gustav; Gustav does not know Nora. Gustav loves Nora; Nora will not love Gustav. Gustav’s pull only leads Nora to push harder.

Gustav instead casts blonde, smiley, outgoing, American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) to take over the role originally intended for Nora. He dyes her hair brown and cuts it short. She tries to work with an accent coach. Without either of them saying anything, they both know the film will not work without who or what the story is about: Nora.  

Kemp hesitates at first because of the film’s subject matter: Gustav’s mother’s suicide. She hanged herself in the house, Gustav explains, and for the film we will recreate it exactly as it happened. 

“She’s motivated,” Gustav says about Kemp, “I told her that footstool was the one my mom used to hang herself.”

“The one from IKEA?” asks Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), Gustav’s youngest daughter.

Rachel’s commitment to the film wavers further as tension continues to build between the sisters and Gustav. He reaches for them in the wake of their mother’s death, and Nora’s suicide attempt, which he seemingly is ignorant to yet writes a film for her where she kills herself in the house that presumably drove her, or welcomed her, into a real-life depression. 

What is so frustrating about Gustav is that he believes he has the ability to grab at his children at his leisure, that they eventually will be drawn to him if he keeps trying to reel them in. He does not accept that he is ten to twenty-five years too late, and doesn’t know how to connect with Nora and Agnes — or anybody — without picking them apart and putting them in front of a camera. If they’re unwilling to be this naked, then they must be unwilling to reconcile with him:

“Everyone’s mad at dad, huh?” he says, “You two turned out fine, didn’t you?”

To which Nora replies, “How can you tell? You don’t even know us.”

“I know it’s been hard for you. I recognize myself in you. But you’re so goddamn angry. It’s hard to love someone who’s so full of rage.”

A stubborn father and suicidal daughter do not a stable foundation make. This is palpable — Rachel backs out of Gustav’s movie as Nora’s illness begins to snowball and Gustav is left flailing. This is why “Sentimental Value” is able to close in the way it does, with Nora unraveling a line of rope and stepping on top of the IKEA footstool before gently closing the door to the same sideroom where her grandmother hung. 

Then the director yells, “CUT!”

Maybe Nora chooses to kill herself in front of her father for a chance to be understood by him. Maybe her on-stage, scripted suicide will cure her cold feet. Maybe the worn house needed some weight off its shoulders.

Regions: Boston