By Keaton Wilder Marcus

Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix-winning Sentimental Value is like a parent reading a book to their child before bedtime. As the audience, we are the child who steals the book for ourselves instead of going to sleep to uncover whatever secrets are hiding behind the censorship of our parents’ voices. And that is much of the sensation we feel while viewing this movie - because like the Anton Chekov plays that Trier tore pages from and taped onto Sentimental Value - the audience peels through the movie as if it has pages to be turned.

Norwegian actress Bente Børsum is the parent within the film's opening sequence as she recalls an essay Nora (Renate Reinsve) wrote about her family’s home. Nora assumes the home’s perspective in the essay, which her family has owned since the Second World War. She imagines it through noise and through silence, and how the house’s windows are like eyes whose secrets will never be told to those living within it. The house’s stomach is left empty when Nora’s auteur filmmaker father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) suddenly abandons their family. Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are left to each other’s own devices until their mother, Sissel, passes away.

Trier always illustrates his ideas with tangible objects: whether that be the house as a visible character or its stove as a generational entryway for children into the private conversations of adults. The stove signals the arrival of Gustav at Sissel’s funeral to Nora, who listens to him through the object as she did when she was younger. Nora is now a stage actress engaged in a scandalous relationship with her married co-star Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lee). Gustav despises the theater in spite of Nora’s talent, but he also has an offer: a role in his autobiographical feature film about a character resembling his own mother. Unsurprisingly, Nora declines the part - which draws a curious line of maturity between herself and Chekov’s fame-driven Nina, who she portrays in Sentimental Value's adaptation of The Seagull.

Gustav is not only a complicated man in how he exercises his relationship with Nora and Agnes in the art he makes — but in how he develops a paternalism over young women he believes he can mend his fatherly shortcomings with. This paternal quality is only one of the many reasons why American superstar Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) is so willing to star in his next film as a replacement for Nora. Fanning expands on her character’s effervescent face value with the lovable earnest of a daughter trying to impress her father. She is insecure about the fact that she only speaks English and is the only one in Gustav’s film without a Scandinavian accent; and it’s this self-deprecation towards her American heritage that not only humanizes her starry image, but proves it so difficult for her to embody who Gustav is truly writing about: Nora.

Rachel is a documentarian afraid of infiltrating the personal lives she must excavate as an actress. She, like many of the other characters in the film, is a child trying to uncover the secrets behind Gustav’s voice. Trier and cinematographer Kaspar Tuxen depict this sentiment so skillfully in a scene between Rachel and Nora as they converse about what Gustav has concealed from them not only as a director, but as a father. Fanning’s Rachel isn’t solely compelling because she is ambitious, but because the details in her performance are so conscious of how this role reveals the lack of ethics involved in her life as an actress.

Reinsve’s Nora claims she is “terrified of intimacy” while in bed with Jakob. There is a humanity in Nora revealed here when the audience recalls her violently kissing Jakob - and asking him to slap the nerves out of her - as an acting exercise before her performance in The Seagull. Trier doesn’t define Nora for Reinsve but rather hands that responsibility to Reinsve instead. Her job as an actress playing an actress is to uncover the secrets behind Trier’s authorship of the character she is portraying. The mistake many male writers make while crafting female characters is that they seek to define what is already within the actress they are casting to play the part. The character you write is not yours once it is casted - but rather a gift to the woman who will bring the role to life. Let her run and she will figure out your questions about the character herself. Reinsve runs a marathon with Nora. Fanning with Rachel. Lilleaas with Agnes.

If the audience is a child the entire film and Rachel a child while she experiences Gustav’s old film on-screen, Nora gets to be a child smirking at Gustav despite the fact that she convinces herself to avoid him; she is a child giggling at Gustav buying a DVD for the infamously graphic Irreversible for Agnes’ son Erik. Agnes is not only depicted on-screen as a child acting in Gustav’s most acclaimed movie, but on the toilet crying while reading his newest screenplay after refusing to let him cast Erik in the film.

Gustav is a man who loathes having to speak for himself, whether towards his two daughters or in his direction of Rachel: whom he often asks to answer her own questions about the role she is portraying. One could easily say he would much rather lie and flirt and flaunt his own charisma by paying for Rachel’s carriage ride back to her hotel with a bottle of champagne. That sentiment is far from incorrect, but Skarsgard breathes three-dimensional life into his character when he is merely a father searching for Nora in the face of Rachel; or when he is the father to Rachel herself that he wasn’t to Nora.

Nora may avoid genuine intimacy, but she also avoids the uncompromising answers Agnes seeks in their grandmother’s rebellious past during World War Two. Perhaps all of Sentimental Value’s characters are afraid of exiting their comfort zones. Agnes was cast as a child in Gustav’s previous film yet her maternal instinct says “no” to the idea of Erik being in his latest project. Rachel is one of the most popular actors in the world and yet she is insecure about how her image affects this aging director’s newest work. What is Joachim Trier afraid of? What has he conquered while writing and directing this towering project?

It’s silly to say that Sentimental Value is simply a work of navel-gazing when tiny pieces of Trier clearly lie in every character. They lie in the fabric of the house this family resides within. And maybe our greatest fear lies in when the arteries of this house are punctured by the renovations it goes under. What we’re left with is Trier accomplishing what his characters are trying to accomplish the entire film: something new.