Sentimental Value

[MikoTython]

Saw this last nite on the beautiful U o' Chicago campus. Cost me 7 bucks.

Here being an actual adult-themed film you could see at a major theater - imagine that.

I found the film to be challenging and somewhat wonderful for what it aspired to convey, in fact succeeded at doing, at expressing in a not unrealistic or patronizing or smarmy fashion the dynamics of three generations of a complex family history. Largely concerned with the ineffability of communication & connection of experience & perhaps accounting for one's self - not only on the part of the faulty father, but also the children - in the context of a narrative family framework composed of inter-generational trauma, denial, abandonment, coping, halting attempts at reconciliation, truth telling, selfishness, etc., etc.

Highly recommended. These Europeans just refuse to dumb things down for us, bless them.

[MikoTython]

Reading this the next day, it sounds kind of stilted. Suffice to say, I enjoyed the film, it said something fairly complex without so many words, resonated w/ my own experience in various ways.

[Dicktar2023]

I had mixed feelings. I wish there had been more of the daughters and their lives and dynamic and less time spent on the dad (and Elle Fanning). Skarsgaard got a lot across about that character without having to do much, and so I felt like a lot of the stuff with his creative process and such was a bit tedious at times. We start out with a very dark and funny introduction to Nora, but then the movie never really follows up on that.

To me this movie suffers a bit just because the premise is so wonderful. A great filmmaker tries to get his estranged daughter to play a version of herself in an autobiographical movie he's making, and when she turns him down he hires another actress, and tries to turn her into his daughter. You can't help but fantasize about what Bergman or Fellini (or Charlie Kaufmann) would have done with that premise. It doesn't seem fair to Trier, but the main problem here is that he's no Bergman. He doesn't really have the interest in metaphysics or the palate for dark satire, and so we get a great idea for a movie executed in (IMO) a pretty meh way. There are some very moving scenes, but there is none of the rumination of the nature of personal identity or the cold intractability of time that I guess I was hoping for. Instead, you know,

Spoiler

his daughters don't like him, but they learn to forgive him, and he deals with some of his own [shirt]. Art heals everything, in the end.

Roll Credits. Ok, fine.

No denying that the performances are great, particularly from Reinsve and Lilleaas.

[MikoTython]

I had mixed feelings. I wish there had been more of the daughters and their lives and dynamic and less time spent on the dad (and Elle Fanning). Skarsgaard got a lot across about that character without having to do much, and so I felt like a lot of the stuff with his creative process and such was a bit tedious at times. We start out with a very dark and funny introduction to Nora, but then the movie never really follows up on that.

To me this movie suffers a bit just because the premise is so wonderful. A great filmmaker tries to get his estranged daughter to play a version of herself in an autobiographical movie he's making, and when she turns him down he hires another actress, and tries to turn her into his daughter. You can't help but fantasize about what Bergman or Fellini (or Charlie Kaufmann) would have done with that premise. It doesn't seem fair to Trier, but the main problem here is that he's no Bergman. He doesn't really have the interest in metaphysics or the palate for dark satire, and so we get a great idea for a movie executed in (IMO) a pretty meh way. There are some very moving scenes, but there is none of the rumination of the nature of personal identity or the cold intractability of time that I guess I was hoping for. Instead, you know,

Spoiler

his daughters don't like him, but they learn to forgive him, and he deals with some of his own [shirt]. Art heals everything, in the end.

Roll Credits. Ok, fine.

No denying that the performances are great, particularly from Reinsve and Lilleaas.

I'm going to spoiler this, in order that those who do get around to seeing the film can then participate - this is way too much interpretation for someone to carry into the film themselves. Ya'll should see it cold, and judge it for yourselves, as this is just one fella's opinion :

Spoiler

At the risk of talking somewhat across you, I'd say first that fwiw, I don't hold the film to, or judge it against, some Bergman standard of nordic bleakness. There was a more 'homely' metaphysics here - the house w/ the faulty foundation yet endures, generations before this family and generations after - this is the context the film provides from the first - also the house as observer, the relation between our more ephemeral selves and our more enduring intimate objects. I thought the daughters were treated rather exhaustively, the actual bleakness of the main character's situation/conflicts narratively leavened by the interplay between the director and his stand-in daughter/actress - with it, the notion that she was being given half a loaf by him (as his daughters had been ?), and smart enough to see it quite clearly. As far as dark satire, his remark that 'this (screenplay/film) isn't about my mother' I thought was rather deftly amusing.

I also appreciated that even though his basic role is 'the (guilty) absent father who caused all the pain', he wasn't written to knuckle under to that - but spoke a hard truth to his troubled daughter, which she received & apparently, profited by. He wouldn't patronize her art, which goes both likely to his stubbornness and/or integrity, the raw material of their reconciliation. He's not a bullsysser. Not going to her performance could be interpreted as either/or his further thoughtlessness/selfishness/absence, or an innate (fatherly ?) need to hold her to something more 'real', in his estimation rightly or wrongly, he wanted her to aspire to. And with all that, he is himself clearly a flawed alcoholic scarred human being, somewhat groping thru the challenges facing him in later life.

So... yeah - boffo.