SENTIMENTAL VALUE*****

SENTIMENTAL VALUE is a devastatingly brilliant film featuring Renate Reinsve in an award-worthy lead role that could well unseat HAMNET's Jessie Buckley. It plays on the same themes as Noah Baumbach's JAY KELLY but with a willingness to truly explore generational family pain that JAY KELLY just isn't interested in.

In SENTIMENTAL VALUE, Stellan Skarsgard stars as a once-lauded but now faded auteur called Gustav who abandoned his wife and two young daughters to focus on his art  As the movie opens, the girls have matured into young women. The elder, Nora (Reinsve) has become a talented theatre actress but does not want a committed relationship.  The younger daughter, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas) seems happily married and has a young son, but struggles for money. Father and daughters are reunited after the death of the mother, but he is not their to provide emotional or financial support or to express regret.  Rather he wants to use the family house as a set for his comeback film, and for Nora and Agnes' young son to star in it. The familial exploitation doesn't end there, because the screenplay is actually about his own mother, who was apparently part of the Norwegian resistance to the Nazis, was tortured, and ultimately committed suicide in that same family home.  Nora refuses to take part, and so is awkwardly replaced by a young American actress played by Elle Fanning.  The balace of the movie sees each character grapple with their shared family history but also the metatextual layers of bringing that story to screen.

Writer-director Joachim Trier's film is beautifully shot, written and acted and reminded me of some of those superb Woody Allen dramas on the late 80s and early 90s, themselves influenced by Bergman.  It's a film that shows the narcissism of ambitious creatives, but also that hurt people hurt people.  It may also make a point about the redemptive power of art or art as therapy. But as the film closes with the filming of the film-within-the-film's climactic scene, we never truly see the consequences of it. All I can say is that I found it to be a truly ambitious depiction of different timelines, and a rare film to really centre complex female characters, and not to shy away from their spikiness. Reinsve is stunning. This is a film that rocks you to your core and stays with you for days afterwards.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE is rated R and has a running time of 133 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and London. It went on limited release in the USA in November and will be released in the UK on December 26th.