Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, winner of this year’s Cannes Grand Prix, starts off as a contemplation of the memories of a house. The house is anthropomorphised, in the sense that the film imagines, through a narrator, how the building might feel to have people dancing on its floors, or the wind violently shut one of its windows. We get a montage of uses of this Norwegian domicile over several generations of the same family, almost like this might be the arthouse version of Robert Zemeckis’ Here.

This ambitious project moves away from that idea, just one sign of Sentimental Value’s thematic restlessness. However, this choice for introducing us to its ambitions is instructive in preparing us for the type of movie we’re going to see. There seem to be two choices here:  schmaltzy melodrama, or profound masterpiece. Many people found Here to be the former, and the title prepares us to lean in that direction. Any time you evoke the notion of sentiment, you are risking schmaltz.

Turns out there’s a third choice: somewhere in between. Some profound masterpiece moments save Sentimental Value from the excesses of a schmaltzy melodrama, but in truth, that was never really in the range of tonal outcomes for this director. However, a sense builds that Trier isn’t really going for it here, as would be the case in either of the other two extremes. The result is a diverting film with interesting things to say, but lacking the grand unifying theme that would land it for us emotionally.

Certainly there are emotional things to discuss here, and it goes beyond just sentimental attachments to a home that has been in the Borg family for more than a century. The oldest living generation is embodied by celebrated film director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard), who hasn’t made a film in 15 years and has been estranged from his daughters a lot longer than that. He’s now the only representative of that generation as his ex, a former therapist, has just died.

The older daughter is Nora (Renate Reinsve), who has become an actress even though it was her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) who starred in one of Gustav’s most acclaimed films when she was a child. We see Nora involved in a bout of pre-show jitters that almost sabotages one of her stage performances, and know we’re going to learn the psychic underpinnings of that paralysis. Agnes is currently settled down with a husband Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud) and the only representative of the youngest generation, her son Erik (Oyvind Hesjedal Loven). They all come together at the wake of their mother/ex-wife/mother-in-law/grandmother.

Although Nora resents the way her father was never there for the family during his career, and may have given up on him, the reverse is not true for Gustav, who has a new, personal script he’d like to film in this very house, with Nora as the star. Not ready to let her father back in, Nora rejects the offer.

At a Cannes retrospective of his career – it’s never a bad idea to include Cannes in your film if you’d like to win an award there – Gustav catches the eye of Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), an American actress at the top of her game who also appears in high-end perfume ads. She’s moved to tears by the screening of one of Gustav’s classics, the aforementioned film featuring Agnes as a young girl. It isn’t long before he’s offered the role to Rachel, as he’ll reimagine the movie in English and with the backing of Netflix, and trigger Nora even further than he had with his previous inattention.

Father-daughter relationships, both surrogate and actual, are ripe with potential thematic import, especially when that father already treated a woman in their family – his ex-wife – poorly. Trier pokes around at this potential import without really committing to an entry point, though neither does the audience of this thoughtful filmmaker want him to put too fine a point on something. His previous collaboration with Reinsve was The Worst Person in the World, another film whose title provokes ideas that Trier only teases us with fully explicating.

He does avoid this obvious avenue of approach: setting up the Hollywood actress as a direct rival of his daughter the actress, where the former is all too happy to usurp the latter. In fact, Fanning and Reinsve barely share any screen time, and Fanning’s Rachel Kemp clearly has mixed emotions about playing the role Gustav wrote for his daughter. The other actors in Gustav’s new film are Norwegian, and Rachel’s inability to figure out whether to use her own accent, or a put-on Norwegian accent, just hints at her larger qualms.

These are exacerbated by the very personal nature of Gustav’s script – details that have to do with his own mother, who was tortured by the Nazis years earlier. The film also has thoughts on the current state of making movies, one of the few films to use Netflix as a brand without actually being affiliated with the streamer.

Again, the feeling of general richness from moment to moment elevates Sentimental Value. There’s also strong material between the sisters, who have been there for each other unlike their father, but have also fallen afoul of each other. Then why can’t we embrace it just a little bit more?

Some viewers undoubtedly will. The Cannes viewers were among those. Some others may want Trier’s thoughts to crystallise in ways that are just never going to happen, and never were. Even when delivering an ending that does have conventional emotional satisfactions, that ending feels like it can’t work as a conclusion for many of the different thematic branches Trier has introduced.

Maybe it’s like the many different rooms in a house, connected by doorways but all containing something different and separate in form and function. That’s a stretch, but we need to come back to this house, because Trier doesn’t – not in the way he introduced it to us, anyway. Wrapping with explicit bookends is also never something a filmmaker like Trier was likely to do, but it does leave us with questions about why he went down that road to begin with.

 

Sentimental Value opens in cinemas on Boxing Day.