EXCLUSIVE: Joachim Trier is seated by a gigantic picture window that looks out over the mountain range that hugs the valley where the Telluride Fil
EXCLUSIVE: Joachim Trier is seated by a gigantic picture window that looks out over the mountain range that hugs the valley where the Telluride Film Festival is located. He’s here with a gigantic picture of his own, Sentimental Value, which was a mammoth hit in Cannes, winning the Grand Prix.
“That was a joy,” Trier says, but he’s enjoying “the kind of calm, nice atmosphere” in the mountains and feels that’s what “the team and me needed after the whirlwind of Cannes, which was lovely, of course, but it’s so intense and so much a saturation of experience.
“And it’s beautiful and wonderful, but it’s not real,” he reflects quietly as we settle in for what turns out to be a wide-ranging conversation where, dear reader, the filmmaker shows me his legs. But you’ll have to scrawl down for that.
From left: Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård and Joachim Trier in Cannes
Monica Schipper/Getty Images
Telluride has embraced the Toronto-bound film, and there was a long line of filmmakers lining up to grab any available seat for the packed screenings.
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Sentimental Value, which is Norway’s entry for Oscar’s Best International Feature Film, is about a family dealing with historical trauma.
Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustov Borg, a Lear-like filmmaker who showed great promise earlier in his career, only he lacks the self-awareness to realize that’s it’s now too behind schedule to recapture the rapture of youth.
When his estranged wife dies, Borg sweeps into the family home in Oslo, reuniting with his two daughters: Nora, a brittle and often-troubled stage actress, played by Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World), and younger sibling Agnes, who is portrayed by the relatively unknown — until now — Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (A Beautiful Life). Their father wants to make a film about a sensitive episode from his childhood, and he offers Agnes the role. When she rejects him, he persuades a Hollywood blockbuster actress, played by Elle Fanning, to step in.
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That’s a mere outline to the feast that is Sentimental Value, which receives its Canadian premiere Thursday at the Visa Screening Room at the Princess of Wales, followed by a screening Friday at Scotiabank Toronto.
Sentimental Value played like gangbusters in Telluride, and the Neon release is well placed to charge into awards season.
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Trier says the film, in essence, is about “a father who’s been traumatized and ultimately maybe doesn’t know how to talk to his family but knows how to convey it in different ways of expression, mainly cinematic. … It’s a film that’s trying to talk about intimate things.”
I ask him about the Borg family. Are they out of Ibsen or Chekhov or perhaps more in the vein of Eugene O’Neill’s dysfunctional Tyrone family, what with the way the way Skarsgard’s Gustov Borg sweeps back into the family home like O’Neill’s James Tyrone returning from a bender?
The director agrees to a certain degree while noting that he and Skarsgård had discussed the film’s literary references. “Stellan and I talked a lot about Chekhov. Ibsen is someone you have to deal with as a Norwegian, but also I had to look towards American playwrights. So, O’Neill of course, but also Arthur Miller. … Honestly, for this one, I really, really wanted it to reek of cinema, not stage,” he enthuses, leaning forward in his seat to emphasize the point.
“I wanted to engulf it in that [cinematic] life,” he says, noting that he’s the third generation of a filmmaking family.
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His father Jacob Trier was a sound engineer on The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix, a 1975 Norwegian animated film, and several other pictures. His grandfather, Erik Løchen, was a jazz musician and experimental filmmaker whose Jakten was in the 1960 Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection.
Sentimental Value explores the life/work balance. “It’s about choices,” he states.
Stellan Skarsgård and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in Telluride (Baz Bamigboye/Deadline)
The night before, prior to our meeting, he’d seen Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney. While obviously very different in style and substance, both pictures explore the heartbreaking traumas that can result from an artists selfish dedication to their calling. They make a choice. “Every family” has this, Trier reflects. “You only have this time — how do you spend it?”
The film has weighed on my mind, in a good way, since I saw it, twice, during Cannes in May. It has made me ponder those sacrifices artists make in order to create. Trier wrote the film with longtime friend Eskil Vogt, with whom he wrote The Worst Person in the World and Thelma.
They’ve known each other since their behind schedule teens. ”Without sounding too pretentious,” Trier says, “the writing room can almost be like a therapy session sometimes,” a place where they have spent many days not writing but just watching movies by great auteurs. “Then there are days when we also get very personal about things, and I think some of the aspects of family dynamics and stuff in Sentimental Value came from a wish to talk about reconciliation somehow.”
Being of an age now, at 51, where he has “two wonderful daughters” ages 2 and 4, and then also having his parents still around, there is, he allows, “that personal aspect” in Sentimental Value that is indirectly autobiographical “because none of the characters are really me.” Although he observes that he and Vogt have been “in the shoes of all of [the characters].”
He says that it’s his job in the writing room to decide what he wants to spend the next three years doing away from everyone, working demanding “and maybe falling on my arse” on something. “You’ve got to carry the faith and the belief in it — that’s my job.”
It was during one such session in the writing room that he and Vogt came up with the film’s beautifully captured, heartbreaking ending where there are no words spoken between two of the film’s key characters. “We felt it, Eskel and I, at the same time,” he says of writing the scene. “So it’s a true collaboration. We synch in to almost not knowing who came up with what, and at the end of it we don’t want to discuss it too much. [Otherwise] it’s like rock bands taking too much credit for this or that.”
Were there family ghosts that he wanted put to rest with Sentimental Value, I wondered?
His grandfather, Lørchen, was “during the war, a resistance fighter,” Trier explains, and his way of surviving after the war was first, to become a jazz musician playing bass and piano, then he started making jazz films. “He didn’t know about the New Wave, and he made this experimental film called Jakten and it went to Cannes,” his grandson says proudly, joining other 1960’s Official Selection titles by the likes of Michelangelo Antonioni, Carlos Sakura, Vincente Minnelli, Jules Dawson, Nicholas Ray, Jack Cardiff, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini, whose La Dolce Vita won the Palme d’Or.
“It’s ridiculous,” he marvels. “He was there and Norway didn’t have a film industry or anything … and they said ,’Oh, it’s Nouvelle Vague,’ and he goes, ’Oh, I call it a jazz movie.’ He didn’t know, but there was no infrastructure, so he didn’t make so many films after that and he became more politically orientated trying to help there be an infrastructure for filmmakers.”
Joachim Trier (Baz Bamigboye/Deadline)
Løchen passed away when Trier was a child. “But I also think that he was a man who was so deeply traumatized by the experience of war and how that affected my family in direct and indirect ways, and raising children thinking that it takes at least three generations to lay things to rest. And also, I mean, he was captured. He was in a work camp and barely survived, and he never slept a good night’s sleep for the rest of his life. So I have that. And to be quite frank with you, when I talk about the film, I’m always sometimes worried if I talk about those things, that people will think, ‘Oh, that’s the main plot.’ This is really, as you know about a bigger picture of understanding that to forgive your parents, you have to understand their childhood or something. I’m trying to grapple with that. But of course it plays in realizing as you get older that you think the Second World War is this narrative that happened a long time ago, and suddenly you realize that, ‘Yeah, wow, if I look at my life as a pendulum and you take it back from now from when I was born.’ And I don’t if you’ve had this experience thinking about how recent certain events were actually.”
We reflect for a moment on how WW2 may have ended eight decades ago but that global tragedy still deeply influences world affairs — Ukraine and Russia, for example.
“And the dichotomy of the responsibility towards memory, which we could also bring into the conversation about family, right? Because we have responsibility to forget certain things, to forgive, we have responsibility to remember, and that is where we are. And that’s what we do in a family as a microcosmos as well. We try to reconcile ourselves with what we didn’t get, but try to accept what we did get. We tried to deal with that, in our film,” he suggests.
And so the kernel of the story, about two sisters, that was “essentially there from the beginning,” plus he wanted to reunite with Reinsve following their triumph with 2021’s The Worst Person in the World. “That was an energy in itself. I knew we had more stuff to do together, and I know her very well. And she’s also a little bit older, and she was kind of playing a slightly younger character than who she was already in The Worst Person in the World. We see that film stretching back into her early 20s, into her early 30s, but actually at the time, she was already in her 30s. So I felt there was a more mature character to explore in her,” he says, noting that as with The Worst Person in the World, the up-to-date film was written for her.
He was interested in the two sisters — Norah and Agnes — and how different they are. Trier cites Joan Didion’s observation that “we tell stories in order to live,” which for him suggests “that idea that we are narrative creatures in a family, and the youngest is not an artist at all. She’s an academic and works with other things, but still they’re grappling.”
Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in ‘Sentimental Value’ (Neon/Everett Collection)
Because, I say, Agnes has been bruised by her connection to art, however distant she is from that discipline.
Trier nods agreement but says Agnes is ”as we all are,someone who needs a narrative to understand herself and is negotiating that with her family now being a parent like her sister isn’t. So that vigorous was at the core of the beginning of wanting to do this.”
We discover that we’re both intrigued, fascinated even, by movies about sisters as much as we are about female siblings in real life. And although Reinsve excels in the showier role of the older sister, it struck me early on watching the movie that Ibsdotter Lilleaas’ Agnes is in charge of that relationship.
“Isn’t that interesting? And that’s very Inga,” Trier observes. “She’s very grounded.”
Trier says he coped with a sort of balancing act in trying to find the sense of “tenderness or quite strong, intimate emotions” while still trying to keep space for the audience. “This is a film where I’m observing intimate behavior between people, so I don’t want it to be too manipulative. So there’s always that struggle to create space for interpretation in the performance in the moment, but also in between the sections of the film to try to find a narrative structure where there are ellipses. We are not told everything. Sometimes we jump in the middle of something and have to figure it out backwards a little bit. Like, ‘Oh, we’re in a film.’ ‘Oh, no, we’re at a film festival.’ Trying to find a narrative structure that leaves the audience in a space of interpretation, because I want to invite them into the film. Yet we are actually also doing closeups with people in real torment and wounded people. So that’s been kind of the thing that’s been what we’re dealing with here, trying to find that balance. And I think the performers are a big part of that,” he adds, noting that “Inga is someone who’s really interesting to observe in a process like that.”
At its world premiere in the Grand Lumière in Cannes, I filmed the giddy 19-minute ovation for Deadline, a moment that Trier says he’ll never forget. “It means the world to us. … A part of me is a shy Norwegian guy who’s just like, someone’s singing a birthday song for you for 19 minutes. But I must say, of course you appreciate it, and we’ll never forget it.”
Are you a shy Norwegian guy? I ask.
“I’m a mixture, half Danish, half Norwegian,” he says while explaining that his father is Danish and his mother is Norwegian and that he was born in Copenhagen but grew up in Norway. “I feel more Norwegian,” he says.
”I would say Denmark is continental, more sophisticated culturally. They had a gigantic aristocracy and art and architecture. … And Copenhagen, I think, is one of the most sophisticated and nice cities to be in the world in terms of infrastructure, green thinking,” he explains.
Stellan Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve in ‘Sentimental Value’ (Neon/Everett Collection)
On the other hand: ”Norway has nature and it’s wilder. People have lived traditionally more on mountaintops alone. We have a variety of dialects in a compact country that I don’t think we have in any other country, almost, in the world. So there’s a lot of that individual struggle of surviving. … While Copenhagen, it’s a slightly more southern European feeling. So in my upbringing, it was always, ‘I’m a city guy.’ I grew up in Oslo and Copenhagen and I longed for culture. I was into hip-hop as 19-year-old,” with Africa Bambaataa providing the beat that hypnotized him. He was into skateboarding and lived an urban life.
He recalls an argument his parents once had where his mother remarked to his father, ”You can’t get lost in the Danish wood, while wilderness is Norway.”
It’s kinda in the name. Norway is farther north and its wilderness, Trier believes, affects the culture. “It’s like a deep sense that you can walk into a wood and get really lost. You can die on a mountain if you’re not careful. That must affect us. In Denmark, it’s like you walk out of the wood and you find a bar. So there’s something about those cultures that differ. And Norwegians are considered more introverted. I’m generalizing terribly now, but, and Danes are like the French. They will argue in a store and then they will hug and walk away. Norwegians don’t fight or argue. They’re very, ’Please, go in front of me in the line.’
While the Danes are: ‘F*ck you, man. Get in the back.’ So I have both elements,” he says, smiling.
Do those two cultures clash within him when he’s working on a film project, I wonder?
“I think ultimately to be director, I try to nourish trust. I don’t like aggressive people on my set, but I am not scared of conflict. It’s one of my few talents, honestly. I don’t step away from conflict. I don’t have time. I want it out. ‘Come on, what’s wrong? Let’s get on it.’ So it’s trying to find that balance. I think making, sorry, this is probably tedious for people to hear about, but it’s very technical. But actually, making movies is a strange mixture of poetry and being a general, militaristic. My team is really prepped. We’re anticipating everything. But when the actors come in, it’s like I say to the team, ‘Now we’re changing wheels on a Formula One car, get the lamps, we’re driving,’“ he says, furiously clicking his fingers.
“I have three 1st ADs … everything is structured. And then when the actors come in, we play and we’re free and we pretend we have all the time in the world and things are soft and everyone’s quiet and appreciative. No one sits in the wrong place. I sit next to my DOP, Kasper [Tuxen], and then when we’re done with that shot and the actors leave and then it’s, ’Come on, come on, let’s do it,’” as he waves his arms as if to demonstrates the energy when the crew turns around a set. “It’s like in restaurants, it’s that vigorous. You need different energies. And the sous chef is the 1st AD. And I had some great people around me, and I love that. I love being on set. I love shooting.“
He says that it’s critical to always try and prep the team in the morning about what the actors are “actually going to go through. And it’s tough, like what Renate had to go through in this film. … She goes through opening up emotional spaces in herself that come from wounded, sad things that she somehow accesses and allows herself to keep open through the process.”
For him, Trier says, the rehearsals are “about hanging out and trusting each other. And they must know I love them. And that I won’t think they’re foolish if they do weird stuff and they take a risk, take a chance, do something strange.“
Whatever, Trier and his actors did between rehearsals and arriving on set, worked, because, strange as it may sound, I was able to feel a character’s heartbeat as I watched Sentimental Value. And I believe that’s because the performances go so deep — there’s no artifice.
Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning in ‘Sentimental Value’ (Neon/Everett Collection)
That goes for all the key actors. We chat for a moment about Elle Fanning playing Rachel Kemp, the Hollywood actress Gustov brings in.
Trier remarks that he’s “curious whether people see how sophisticated and subtle” Fanning is in the movie.
“Remember, Elle has as much experience as an actor in their 40s — I mean she’s been acting since she was a tiny toddler, and she has a knowledge of the craft and the life on set and stuff. I think what was beautiful was that I think she really took a risk with a lot of this and just said, ‘OK, let’s do this.’ It was super easy to work together. She was extremely open, and I’m grateful.”
During the writing, he says, they were careful not to turn Fanning’s role into “a caricature of a Hollywood star. That would be too silly; we don’t want that. And she completely brought it. What she’s playing is a human being.”
During the writing process, he was constantly in touch with both Reinsve and Skarsgård. ”I needed Stellan to finish the scripts. So I actually got to know him. I didn’t know him before. I met him once, like briefly, at a director’s birthday party.”
But Reinsve was the first actor he pitched the idea to. ”I sat down and we probably had two hours where I told her the structure of the story and the themes and why I think it would be great to do it with her. And it sounds cheesy, but I think we both wept a bit because we both understand the aspect of Nora … the kind of feeling that we only exist in our work sometimes. That’s our place, that’s our home. And that dichotomy is something we talked a lot about. And I think we will find that with a lot of people that work in movies.”
That reminds him, he says, suddenly deeply moved, of working with the “the wonderful, wonderful Jenne Casarotto, who we lost.” He’s with Elinor Burns now at Casarotto Ramsay & Associates, and with Jeremy Barber at UTA. “Jenne’s always been there as a godmother. And I remember when they signed me up after film school and I was terribly proud because I thought they were a great supportive agency. I remember Jenne just looking at me saying, ‘I’ve seen your work, Joachim, and now talking to you, I promise you, we will help you with your addiction.’ She knows what it means. And it’s hard to talk about in public because it sounds so pretentious. … We got to go there and really do something where we’re scared and vulnerable for it to make sense to mean anything. So Renate and I talked about that a lot. And is it possible to be properly seen by a character like Gustav, that notion? Is it possible?”
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I ask Trier what it must have been like for a director to have to convince his leading artist to trust him — not to resist him — enough to be able to walk on a high wire without a net as Reinsve does in this movie. How can he convince her that she won’t fall off? “It’s almost like a path of emotion through a scene,” he explains. “And it’s my job to make sure they have the knowledge or the understanding they need to have. And a lot of that we get out of the way during those conversations and rehearsal periods. And I rewrite a bit, while constantly Eskil [Vogt] is watching videos of my rehearsals, and we’re talking in the evenings and we are shaping the material continually throughout the process.”
Trier himself is on a tightrope, especially when there’s an intense emotional scene involved, as there was when Reinsve’s Nora clashes with her father during the scene with Skarsgård when he offers her his script and she feels so let down by him. “She’s just lost her mother and she needs a father … and Renate, inhabiting Nora, is furious and pissed. And of course then she will be in that state a lot that day. And I will have to both help guide, create variation, which is my job, to make sure we explore the scene properly without giving too many notes. … But there’s this kind of tense electric thing that I just have to help her with.” And they get through it because, he observes, they’re prepared because they have covered it already during rehearsals and the earlier discussions.
“The nice thing about being a writer-director is that I know the text and I know that the words are only there as a support. I’m not one of those filmmakers who” believes a script is sacrosanct. “It’s not holy, we can change it around a lot if we need to. And I always do what we call jazz takes.”
That’s a term, he explains, that he and actor Anders Danielsen Lie (The Worst Person in the World) came up with during the making of Oslo, August 31st, part of his Oslo trilogy that includes Reprise and the Worst Person in the World.
It’s about, he tells me, “when you do really intense scenes and you nailed a few takes and you felt you explored it. A jazz take is — when I say jazz, I mean it as the ideal or performative art in the sense that if you look at everyone who played bebop, how they were trained for specific tough precision, but when they let it go suddenly, that’s that extra quality. And that’s the ideal in art for me. Anders and Renate, They’re so good. They’re so smart. They prep, they know their stuff, they can do it good, but then to do that extra take or two where they say, ’F*ck it, I just feel like I’m not going to say all of that. I’m going to jump to this moment in the scene.’ … And then suddenly they need that other line from early in the scene that comes in here and it gets messy and we just keep rolling and it loops a bit and they come back in and suddenly something arrives. You know the tune, but you’ve played free,” he says, gasping as if he’s been riffing on an alto saxophone. “That’s what we’re aiming for.”
An example of “jazz takes” that’s pertinent to Sentimental Value, he says, involves both Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Reinsve in a moment with the sisters when “Inga and Renate hug. And I am next to the camera and I’m weeping because Inga is so good. And I say to Inga, ‘Go into the bed and hug her.’ And It wasn’t in the script. And so she gets to the bed, they hug, and Kasper [Tuxen, cinematographer] is pushing me out of the way and then we just keep rolling. We roll and roll and roll. We have gigantic magazines with 35mm film.
From left: Anders Danielsen Lie, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Joachim Trier, Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning at the ‘Sentimental Value’ photocall in Cannes Film Festival (Kristy Sparow/Getty Images)
“So, it’s the there-and-then-ness, that’s the kick,” he says, punching his fist into his hand, “within a really structured plan. The dialectic of that control into that chaos moment. That’s all we’re trying every day. Some days it’s not as good as others, but that’s what we want.”
That electrifying in-the-moment style of filmmaking, he declares, comes from his youthful wildcat days skateboarding. “I was standing there with the f*cking camera and my friends. I was making skate videos. They try to do 360 kick flips 20 times down the staircase and fell, and suddenly it’s there. Perfect landing. Yes, I got it, now I put it in my video. I got that moment. I love that. I think that’s fun.”
He broke arms and legs as a skateboarding teen. But he’s still something of a daredevil, I would say.
Without prompting he leans toward me and whispers, “Do you want to see something?”
Slowly, he rolls up the trousers encasing his [very white and pale, if I may say so] left leg.
“Six years, seven years ago,” he begins,” I was really doing a lot of slalom and downhill on skis, going too quick. And I fell riding something like 60, 70 kilometers an hour … and I spent a year learning to walk again. So I’ve had five operations. My whole knee was smashed up.”
For a while, Trier says, he looked like something out of a David Cronenberg film. “I had external fixation. I had to learn to walk again. I had 15 titanium screws inside. I’m an old skater, so I called old friends and I got the physio that trains the alpine ski team because they have knee problems all the time. And I got one of their guys to train me for a year. And I had great surgeons who I adore,” he says merrily. “I invited them to the premiere of The Worst Person in the World and thanked them from the stage. I jumped on one leg and I said, “I couldn’t have fucking done this film without you guys.’”
I gaze, fascinated by the tapestry of his scars neatly sewn up and down the tibial plateau. (Yeah, I’ve become conversant in the lingua franca of Shonda Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy — don’t ask.) “The plateau was smashed, but they managed to put it together. It’s grown,” Trier says. “And we’ve removed all the titanium and it works, but I have to work out a lot. I have to keep it flexible. I’ve got to work on it the rest of my life. But the thing is, I had the time to rest and think. I think it was existentially a good year for me.”
Joachim Trier with his Cannes prize (Baz Bamigboye/Deadline)
It was during the time of healing his leg that the ideas for Sentimental Value, that of a fractured family, began to develop.
Because he comes from a family of jazz lovers, I ask him what music he was connecting to most when he was writing the film. “I’m thinking a lot about John Coltrane,” he responds.
His mind wanders for a moment to the complete Jackson Pollock collection that he saw at the Tate when he was living in London while studying at the National Film and Television School. “You could trace the explosion of going from trees into more abstract structures into action painting. And thinking of Coltrane, I mean, A Love Supreme,” he says of the musician’s seminal 1965 album. “There’s a tremendous precision and freedom at the same time. I think as an example.”
The film opens with a piece by the behind schedule jazz, folk and soul artist Terry Callier. And Callier’s music connects Trier to those seven years he spent in London, often sharing an apartment with Olivier Bugge Coutté, the celebrated editor he has collaborated with since Pietà, the 19-minute tiny they made 25 years ago.
We spend half an hour discussing music and our mutual love of classic soul. I tell him about the time my son — then in his teens — compiled a hundred of my favorite soul tracks. When I listened during a flight to Los Angeles, I was so moved because he’d been paying attention to the music I love and I hadn’t been aware of his attentiveness. “It’s like a portrait of you and music,” Trier says, clearly moved.
Can you dance? I ask him, what with the break in his left knee.
“I can do anything now. It’s actually OK. The only thing I think is that I need to keep training. So the body is a live thing. You’ve got to keep it sustainable,” he says, jiggling his legs around.
He needed sturdy legs as he walked around Oslo in search of the house that would occupy the Borg family in Sentimental Value.
Trier and his team scouted more than 400 buildings until they found a attractive historical home that’s owned by Norwegian rock musician Lars Lilli-Stenberg. “It’s like casting, and you know very quick sometimes. I knew the house, that’s the irony. And I looked at hundreds of houses and then I said, ‘F*ck, we’ve got to go with this.’ It’s like four blocks from where I live.”
He took his co-writer to the house and as they walked around, the geography of where they’d imagined various rooms changed. Within an hour they were back at their desks rewriting the screenplay to match the floor plan of Lillian-Stenberg’s home.
Trier insists that he doesn’t know what he’s doing next. “I’m one of these weird people. I don’t develop a lot of things. I actually sit down every time mostly and say, ‘What do I want to do? Where am I now in my life?’ And then it takes those cycles of three or four years to make a film for me. So I haven’t really had time to be frank. I can promise you I’ll keep telling human stories.”
There’s a heartfelt moment in Sentimental Value when Skarsgård’s Gustov goes to see his ancient friend, a cinematographer, and they reminisce about movies they made decades earlier. Times has passed and age has slowed them down. But the art they created is preserved intact on celluloid.
“Isn’t that why movies as an art form is the idea of preservation, registration and therefore time passing, and death, mortality is at play because we’re dealing with memory art, cinema is the memory art form?” Trier says. “We’re playing with the given time. That’s what we do. We shape that stuff.”
In the gondola on the way back down the mountain to Telluride, Cannes Film Festival topper Thierry Frémaux hops on at the halfway station. He purrs like a contented cat when he learns who I’ve just spent two hours with. “That’s one of ours from Cannes,” he says as he beams at the couple sitting opposite in the cable car, neither of whom are in the industry. He then goes on to educate them as to why Sentimental Value is one of the year’s “greatest films.”
It’s a view that I share with him.
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