When Joachim Trier was creating Sentimental Value, he knew that it was about two sisters and their father. “I didn’t want to make a movie that felt like a chamber drama, where people sit around a table and talk.”
Trier wanted to give the characters movement.
“Sentimental Value” is a Norwegian drama about two sisters (Renate Rijnsve and Inga Ybsdotter Lileas) who try to reunite with their estranged film director father (Stellan Skarsgård) when a rising American star (Elle Fanning) decides to star in a new movie.
To add perspective and move the characters, Trier introduced the idea of the family home as another character. “This house has given us the key to understanding a larger perspective on time and this family’s story.”
The film begins with Agnes and her sister Nora (Reinsve) dealing with the aftermath of their mother’s death. The family home has a distinctive red exterior, but it has a lot of history. It has been in the house for generations, and now her estranged father, Gustav, wants to shoot a movie here.
Through narration, Nora shares stories and narrates her past. We learn that Gustav’s great-grandfather died in the same upstairs bedroom where his grandmother was born. It turns out that her mother died in the downstairs room, and Nora was eavesdropping on her mother’s sessions through the fireplace.
In an interview with Variety, Trier explained that the montage of the house follows 130 years. “There’s also the idea of a more philosophical look at how short human life is from the perspective of the house, and the idea of inherited trauma. Those themes that permeate the background were given a more interesting, more interesting visual and formal approach thanks to the house.” “The house helped us tell the story in an original way,” he added. He also revealed that when he was 11 years old, he accidentally started a fire in his house, and that moment was “so ingrained” in his mind that he co-wrote the scene with Eskil Vogt.
Can you talk about this “house montage” and the information you wanted to convey?
Joachim Trier: This is an essay written by my eldest daughter Nora, who is 12 years old, about home like a character in her English class. She reveals a lot and reveals that she comes from a home where her parents are fighting. She also reveals that she uses her creativity to create things, perhaps almost as a means of avoidance, without looking at the real-life problems, which is a recurring theme for her and her father throughout the film. But it is also a story of reconciliation. We don’t have an eternal relationship with our parents, so if we want to forgive them or at least take small steps towards reconciliation, this movie is about that.
On a personal note, I don’t talk about it much, but when I was 11 years old, I accidentally set the top floor of my parents’ house on fire the night before Christmas. While I was leaving the room, a candle fell over and it caught fire. Posters of Madonna and Michael Jackson on the wall also caught fire, and the house started to burn, so it had to be rebuilt. I remember losing all my belongings when I was 11 years old. We were just dumbfounded by my stupid actions, but the idea of anything immutable was suddenly dispelled. So this idea of a place being rebuilt and becoming different felt like the soul of the house had changed, and I think that seeped into the back of my mind as I wrote this.
Olivier, what was going through your mind when the conversation turned to how the sequence needed to look?
Olivier Bouge Coutet: It is a phenomenological study of space. From an editing perspective, I incorporate light, room shapes, and sounds to guide the edits that bring the piece together. It’s like dismantling a house piece by piece. Many shots had no specific location. There were also pictures of houses, windows, and children running around. So we built it and left a pause for the space of the house to sink in. Leave plenty of free space outside the frame where the sound can be heard. Because we experience things better when they are outside the frame, when we hear them than when we see them. And that leads to a different experience.
What was the collaboration like?
Trier: It’s clearly written and in the same place as the script. During filming, I found better moments here and there, so I changed the narration a little. Olivier is good at montage work, so it’s exciting to interleave parts that aren’t what you had planned. It’s also to see if he can create something more exciting, which he always does. We were looking for poetry in this house throughout the shoot.
Kutte: Our cinematographer, Casper, is very creative, and when we cut to a black and white house built like a stick, he built that little house. He did it without telling anyone.
Trier: We were talking about doing something along those lines, but it would have been too expensive to build a whole house, so he used scale perspective to create that moment. And it has now become a core element of montage.
Since windows play an important role in visuals, did they have some kind of metaphorical meaning?
Kutte: If you pay attention to the cut, the space will come before the person, so the frame will be empty. There are people in the frame. Ask them to leave and leave the frame empty. The frame is in front of and behind the person.
Olivier mentioned narration earlier. What is the story behind it?
Trier: We were looking for an authoritative voice to tell the story of the 20th century. The voice is provided by Bente Bolsum, who is in his 90s. She was the lead role in my grandfather’s movie “The Chaser.” My grandfather was captured and imprisoned during World War II and was also part of the resistance, so it’s very traumatic. The background of our film is the theme we are dealing with: inherited trauma: three generations of war, trauma, and the Holocaust. Bente Bolsum’s mother was also imprisoned during the war and barely survived, so I knew she could relate to that experience with my grandfather. Years later, she became a famous actress and using her as a voiceover somehow reminded me of my grandfather, and it was a full-circle moment.
How did you match the tone of the narration to that montage and what we were seeing?
Kutte: This is a play between narration and space, and rather than bringing the narration to the foreground, we leave moments where the space comes alive. We played the narration and then left it to the house.
As the camera moves away, I ask about the final shot and see Nora and Gustav. Can you talk about that last shot?
Trier: That’s when I knew early on that we had a movie in the script room, when I realized what the ending of this movie was going to be and the parts that we don’t talk about. This understanding will hopefully give the viewer a deeper perspective on the life choices that Nora and Gustav have made. It’s like a sad love story between a father and daughter who are very similar but don’t know how to function in the world together, and the idea is that they create something together and that’s the best thing they can do. That is, they meet not around the family table, where conversation is impossible, but in this world of their own choosing. I didn’t want it to end like a sell-out where they say everything’s okay or forgive each other. In my experience, life doesn’t work that way.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Read the script below and watch the house montage scene above.
