Stellan Skarsgård is the real reason to watch “Sentimental Value" Not the only one, but definitely the best

Stellan Skarsgård is the crown jewel of Sentimental Value, the new film by Joachim Trier, who continues to take us into his Norway and carries on his collaboration with the actress increasingly open to international success, Renate Reinsve, who rose to prominence thanks to her role in The Worst Person in the World. This time, however, there is a touch of Hollywood in the film. A hint of American spirit grafted onto the European fabric of the title, which, on the occasion of the European Film Awards, won six prizes including Best Film and Best Director, as well as awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, which went precisely to Skarsgård and Reinsve.

In the film, the duo take on the roles respectively of a father with a satisfying, though momentarily stalled, film career and a theatre actress of immense talent. A pair of artists who, however, cannot work together - or at least this is what daughter Nora (Reinsve) believes, as she refuses to star in her parent’s film, who wants to tell the story of his family. To bring the project to completion, the director therefore hires the rising American star Rachel Kemp, a radiant and gentle Elle Fanning, willing to showcase her intense side under the signature of such a renowned author, placing herself in the middle of the already lopsided relationship between the father and young Nora.

Although Sentimental Value is a film inhabited by places, what truly captures attention is the body and aura of the Swedish performer, who guides the viewer through the inside and outside of his old home, which also represents the inner and outer worlds of the characters’ souls, carrying the legacies of those who lived in the same spaces before them. Ghosts that are not frightening, but that hover through the rooms of a house that becomes the stage for events, just as it once was for the happenings in the life of father Gustav Borg (Skarsgård) and his daughters (alongside Renate Reinsve, also Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). A relationship among the three made up solely of memories, few and hazy ones. The father left when they were children, and silence came between them, leaving no room for words.

Stellan Skarsgård’s Gustav Borg is creative, brazen, incapable of understanding the cracks that have formed in his relationship with his daughter (and daughters). Or rather, more accurately, he has chosen to pretend not to see them. Inactive for several years, he wants to return to the spotlight and tell the story of his mother (or at least draw inspiration from her) in the house of his childhood (where he will hold the film rehearsals). Wanting his daughter to portray her is a desire that carries a deep artistic meaning, but also represents a kind of cure for everything that has always troubled him (his parent’s suicide, having been an absent father to his daughters).

Skarsgård is flamboyant in the film, with a character who tries to scale himself back in order to rekindle a family spark that he also hopes to inject into his next project, always on the border between what one wants for personal gain and what one does for the good of others. He is a man who does not know what it means to be paternal, and who does not pretend to have learned it in all those years of distance. He is a grandfather who gives his still-young grandson The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke and Irréversible by Gaspar Noé, preferring to expose him early to the ambiguities of relationships and of the world - the same ambiguities that, reluctantly, his daughters must have experienced, having been unable to establish a genuine relationship with their father all those years.

With his performance, Stellan Skarsgård highlights every crack in the man, yet his Gustav Borg ultimately turns out to be exactly like those characters one often encounters in real life and toward whom one feels anger because, despite anything they do, we cannot manage to treat them with malice. Their exhausting arrogance and ever-present lack of tact do not become obstacles to feeling drawn to their disastrous nature. For Nora and her sister Agnes it is inevitable, being his offspring; for us, it is because he is played by the Swedish actor. A character rendered so three-dimensional that he feels familiar. One who has made mistakes and will probably continue to make them, but who - if he possesses even half of Stellan Skarsgård’s charm and natural talent - would truly be very hard not to forgive every single time.