'Sentimental Value' is an artful and sublime family drama

Joachim Trier explores a fraught father-daughter relationship

I do sometimes wonder how people who make movies do it. Not how they make movies per se, but how they live that kind of life. For weeks or months, a group of people work intensely together. And then, on wrap day, they say goodbye, maybe never to see each other again, and move on to the next one.

Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard) may be unfortunately well-suited to that kind of life. He’s a celebrated director, an irascible, charismatic man who exerts a sort of gravitational pull on a room. If you talk to him at a party, you never forget it.

But then he leaves. And it’s much more difficult to spend your entire life with someone who is constantly leaving, always onto the next thing. It’s not a coincidence, I think, that in the two movies we see by Gustav, both end with somebody leaving someone else behind.

In Joachim Trier’s moving and complex family drama “Sentimental Value,” the ones left behind by Gustav were his two daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve of “The Worst Person in the World”) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Though the relationship between the three of them is fraught, there are pieces of each of them in the others, illustrated by a surreal interlude in which we see each of their faces in close-up, morphing and dissolving into each other.

When Nora and Agnes were growing up, Gustav was often absent, and a restless, difficult figure when he was home. (In a flashback, the two young girls eavesdrop on their parents fighting behind a closed door.) Art seems to be the only way the daughters could reach their father – Agnes acted in one of Gustav’s most celebrated films, then turned her back on filmmaking to become a historian and raise a family.

Nora, meanwhile, became an actor of some note in television and theater, but Gustav found excuses not to see her work. In a bravura sequence, we see Nora experiencing a crippling bout of stage fright before the curtain goes up. We hear that she’s lived with anxiety and depression her whole life, and she seems addicted to the highs and lows of performing.

She also carries a lot of rage towards Gustav, while Agnes often attempts to play peacemaker between the two. In the film, their mother has died after a long illness, and Gustav seems to be in the twilight of his career. It’s easier for him to get a retrospective of his older films than get financing for a new one.

One day, he meets Nora and hands her a script. It’s very personal, inspired by his own childhood, and he wants to shoot it at the family home, with Nora playing his mother. It’s typical of the tangled layers that Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt bring to the characters that this can be perceived as an attempt at reconciliation between father and daughter. But it’s also a mercenary act – Gustav knows working with his daughter is the sort of gimmick that will sell tickets (or subscriptions – in one of the film’s wry asides about modern moviemaking, Gustav’s film is likely going straight to Netflix.)

Nora only sees the mercenary side, and throws the script in his face. But then Gustav meets a popular American actress (Elle Fanning) who’s a big fan, and offers the role to her. Again, it’s a business decision, but also a personal one – Gustav knows it will wound Nora to see someone else in the role.

Business and art, art and artifice, love and hate are constantly entwining in “Sentimental Value,” so much so that even the characters have a hard time separating them. The movie has the textures of a great novel, full of subtle details and things left unsaid, and is structured as a series of chapters, with scenes often ending on a hard cut to black.

Reinsve and Skarsgard are both brilliant actors who can convey so much without saying a word, and von Trier knows how to give each actor time and space to do their work. Just when we have settled on Gustav as the villain of the film, Skarsgard reveals his inner vulnerability, his fear that his life, and the many sacrifices he forced others to make for his art, has amounted to nothing.

In their final scene together, Trier reminds us in sort of a sly way that we’re watching a movie, not real life. But then we see the two actors’ eyes meet, and it seems truer than real life.

“Sentimental Value” is now playing in theaters. In Madison, it will open Friday at AMC Fitchburg 18.