Sentimental Value

There is nothing more scandalous than an art that believes itself innocent.
— Pier Paolo Pasolini

At the center of the film there is less a story than a conflict of gazes. A father, an accomplished director incapable of fully distinguishing between life and representation, and two daughters who bear the weight of an unprocessed past—above all, the weight of having been, potentially, narrative material. The gesture that sets the film in motion—the proposal to turn a family trauma into cinema—is never framed as a scandal nor as an act of reparation; it is presented as a fact, almost an automatic reflex. And it is precisely this naturalness that makes it unsettling.

Trier works through subtraction. Dialogue is often hesitant, fragmented, stripped of any clarifying function. Scenes seem to cut off just before the expected emotional climax, as if the film refused to “arrive.” There is no path toward reconciliation, no reassuring psychological progression. Every attempt at closeness remains ambiguous, tainted by interests, silences, and asymmetries of power. Here, art does not heal; it disturbs, it exposes.

The mise-en-scène reflects this moral stance. The camera is frequently static, detached, almost restrained. The direction observes without tightening, without underlining, without suggesting an emotional hierarchy. There is a clear attempt to engage with a Nordic tradition that points directly to Bergman, particularly in the way domestic space becomes a field of moral and affective tension. Yet this engagement remains incomplete: where Bergman transformed conflict into metaphysical vertigo, Trier stays anchored to a more controlled, more analytical dimension, at times even hesitant to push all the way through. The reference is recognizable, but not fully metabolized.

The figure of the actress-daughter—who refuses to lend her body and voice to a narrative that concerns her too closely—emerges as the film’s true ethical fulcrum. Not because she is idealized, but because she embodies a rare gesture in contemporary cinema: the refusal to be narrated. In this sense, Sentimental Value is also a film about the limits of authorship, about the implicit violence involved in “taking” a story, in turning another’s experience into form, meaning, symbolic value.

There is also an apparently marginal yet revealing detail, such as the gift of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher on DVD to the grandson, which functions as a deliberately exposed dissonance. It is not a simple cinephile homage, but a gesture loaded with ambiguity: giving a child a film that stages control, repression, emotional violence, and domination once again projects the idea that trauma can be transmitted, taught, almost inherited through images. It is an act that says much about the grandfather-director’s character, about his conception of cinema as both formative and intrusive, incapable of truly gauging the impact an artwork may have on its recipient. The reference to Haneke—an author who has relentlessly interrogated the spectator’s role, often with brutality—thus becomes a critical mirror of the film itself: a cinema that reflects on power, gaze, and symbolic violence, yet in circulating them risks reproducing the very dynamics it seeks to analyze.

Sentimental Value by Joachim Trier is a film that does not ask to be loved, but to be endured. Not in the sense of a test of formal resistance, but as an ethical experience: the viewer is asked to remain within an unresolved relationship, to inhabit a distance that is never bridged. It is a cinema that deliberately renounces seduction, catharsis, even identification, in order to interrogate what cinema so often exploits with ease: pain, memory, the family bond.

Here the title finds its deepest meaning. “Sentimental value” never coincides with narrative value. What is most emotionally charged for the characters is precisely what resists representation, what cannot be translated without loss, without abuse. Trier seems to suggest that any attempt to give definitive form to the past is, ultimately, a simplification.

It is perhaps precisely within this awareness that the film also reveals its limits. The ethical radicality of subtraction sometimes turns into a form of emotional neutralization: control is so rigorous that it blunts risk, and certain scenes feel more conceived than lived. The film demands constant attention, yet rarely produces a true rupture, a formal or narrative wound capable of breaking the equilibrium. At times, the fear of being didactic appears to lead to an excess of caution.

Those seeking empathy, momentum, or emotional recognition may feel repelled. Those who accept a cinema that questions its own right to exist will find in Sentimental Value a rigorous, perhaps uncomfortable work, though not entirely resolved in its ambitions. It is a film that challenges the legitimacy of answers themselves—and, in doing so, also exposes its own fragility.

A film that consciously chooses not to close, yet this renunciation at times coincides with an excessive attention to form. Subtraction becomes the dominant method, and in the attempt to preserve the purity of the gesture, the film ultimately diminishes its tragic force. The impression is of a work aspiring to an idea of “art for art’s sake,” reflective and self-referential, yet unable to fully sustain the weight of this ambition. Trier problematizes the right to narrate pain, but does so while remaining consistently one step removed, as if wary of emotional contamination. The result is a rigorous, controlled cinema, capable of great analytical clarity, but one that, precisely through this control, dampens conflict and neutralizes urgency, transforming the ethical limit into a zone of formal safety.

It’s not where you take things from that matters, but where you take them.
— Jean-Luc Godard