SCREEN
A fading director casts around for reconciliation; the Bard, bereaved and reimagined; a grieving tutor turns falconer…
SENTIMENTAL VALUE There’s an epidemic of daddy issues abroad in cinemas right now. Last month, Noah Baumbach cast George Clooney as the beloved Hollywood icon Jay Kelly, desperately spending his autumn years in pursuit of the grown children he neglected in his youth. This month three new movies reckon in their own ways with the legacies of doomed dads, dead dads and plain old despairing dads.
The richest of these is Sentimental Value, the latest film by the Norwegian laureate of black existential comedy, Joachim Trier. The Worst Person In The World may have been retrospectively packaged as the last instalment in his “Oslo Trilogy,” but it is clear by now that the patient cartography of that city’s light, streets and lost souls is a lifetime project for Trier.
This time, the focus is one very specific, gabled, storied, cracked and creaking family home in Oslo’s elegant West End. It is a house garlanded with generational trauma, lovingly annotated with the heights of growing children on doorframes, where the antique stovepipes serve as an unofficial intercom.
The matriarch has died and, after many years in self-imposed exile, the father returns, attempting to make good on all his unfinished business. Fresh from his turn as the OG interstellar dark dad Vladimir Harkonnen in Dune, Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav, an auteur of grand international reputation but diminishing creative returns. Skarsgård is magnificent here with a gravitational pull that is both seductive and repulsive. He is vainly trying to reconcile with his two grown daughters: the mercurial actress, Nora, played by the scintillating Renate Reinsve, and Agnes, a more reticent but no less troubled historian.