Since I first encountered his film Reprise in the depths of the BFI player 5 years ago, I have been continuously astounded by the richness of Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s characters, by the depth of life that emerges from the brief time we spend with them. Trier writes and directs with a quiet devastation and unwavering empathy, holding a mirror to his audience as we examine the attributes of these complex characters that we see reflected in our own lives.
His newest film, Cannes Grand Prix winning Sentimental Value, is not concerned with a single life, but with many: multiple generations of a family haunted by inherited trauma. Crucially, I found this trauma to be inseparable from Europe’s wrought and violent fascist history. While the film’s focal point is the fraught relationship between Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) and his daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), it also opens a window onto a legacy of trauma that haunts the Borg family.
Central to this history is Gustav’s mother, Karin, a resistance fighter who is captured and tortured by the Nazis before later dying by suicide during Gustav’s childhood. Her memory lingers throughout the narrative as a source of constant, unresolved pain. It is not an unfamiliar story, but certainly one we are often inclined (not without reason) to frame almost exclusively through a German narrative. Encountering it here through a Scandinavian perspective feels startlingly unfamiliar but ultimately necessary.
At a moment marked by the re-emergence of fascist politics across the continent, and by a persistent refusal to fully confront the ghosts of the past, the film feels especially urgent. The Borg family, too, is unable to reconcile with its history, and the fissures that run through their past have both literally and metaphorically fractured their home. Yet when the family fails to articulate these wounds, Trier suggests that where language falters, other forms of expression endure. Love and reconciliation are articulated through what can still be done: through archival research, through the creation and process of art, and through the deliberate reshaping of behaviour in the generation that follows. What ultimately matters is not resolution, but the attempt and the insistence on trying.
Although Nazism is not the focal point of most discussions of the film, and at first glance does not appear to be its most salient theme, I am struck by the extent to which fascism and its violent consequences are central to the dynamics of the Borg family. The film presents fascism as the catalyst for the family’s gradual disintegration. When Gustav’s mother is arrested for her involvement in the resistance, it is strongly implied that she has been betrayed by a neighbour. Long before Nora is born, the film thus establishes a fundamental rupture in familial and communal trust. Trier depicts fascism as an ideology that corrodes social bonds: one that dismantles community and depends upon the everyday complicity of ordinary individuals turning against one another. Fascism functions here as a knife that slices through the sinews of human connection. These wounds, Trier suggests, are not so easily healed.
It is tempting to dismiss the kindness of Sentimental Value as insufficiently radical, aligning it instead with a safe, centrist, and ultimately ineffectual “maybe we should all be nicer to each other” ethos. There are certainly films this year that engage political struggle and affirmative action more overtly, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Pynchon-inspired One Battle After Another being a prominent example. Yet despite its more explicit political content, One Battle After Another, like Sentimental Value, is ultimately a story about a father and a daughter. When Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob struggles to navigate the complex, exclusionary password system of the left-wing group the French 75, hampered by age, addiction, and disorientation, we are reminded that political movements are composed of people who are irreducibly human and deeply flawed.
The personal is nearly always political, but the left can sometimes forget the inverse: that the political is always personal. Any collective movement must inevitably include people who are complicated, who fail, who make mistakes. Progress requires a measure of grace. “I need to believe that we can see the other, that there is a sense of reconciliation. Polarisation, anger, and machismo aren’t the way forward,” Trier remarked at the film’s Cannes press conference. The fascistic conditions that allow Gustav’s mother’s neighbours to betray her are those that reduce human beings to rigid binaries: villain and victor, righteous and immoral, citizen and alien (You see what I’m getting at here.) Kindness may not always present itself as the most revolutionary act. But to see another person fully—in their flaws, failures, and beauty—to attempt forgiveness and, as Trier suggests, reconciliation, is a radical gesture in a political landscape increasingly eager to turn us against one another, and to erase the complexity and nuance of human life.
Ailbhe Murphy (she/her, @ailvhe)
qmunicatemagazine.co.uk 