SENTIMENTAL VALUE (Affeksjonsverdi) is the beginning of my awards season viewing ritual of seeing movies that I know almost nothing about except they’re supposedly good. It’s on all the lists of predicted best picture nominees, but also my friend Matt Lynch told me to see it, so I was planning to.
It’s from the Norwegian director Joachim Trier, who has been directing features for almost 20 years but the only one I’ve seen is 2021’s THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, which I enjoyed but did not review. This reunites him with that film’s star Renate Reinsve (who made her debut in his second film, OSLO, 31 AUGUST). It’s one of those director-actor combinations that works so well I assume they’ll make five or ten more.
The story centers around the Oslo home of the Borg family. In the opening scene, a narrator (Bente Børsum) describes it through the perspective of Reinsve’s character Nora, when she had to imagine a building’s feelings for a school assignment. It’s a poetic description of the personality of a house and its meaning to the people who spend their lives in it, multiple generations of the same family living and dying in the same rooms. I thought of Robert Zemeckis’ HERE in this sequence, with its match cuts between time periods, showing the same locations in the dress of entirely different eras. (read the rest of this shit…)
