Affeksjonsverdi
****/****
starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning
written by Eskil Vogt
directed by Joachim Trier
by Walter Chaw Joachim Trier is my favourite living director. Through his work, I’m seen, and in being seen, I am less lonesome, less self-loathing. For a while, anyway. When he finds value in the melancholy heroes of his films, riddled though they may be with depression, prone to stupid mistakes and debilitating anxiety though they are, he finds value, somehow, in me. The first movie of his I saw was Oslo, August 31st, which opens with druggie-in-recovery Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) filling his pockets with rocks like a Danish Virginia Woolf and, on the first night of a day trip away from rehab, walking into a lake. He fails to kill himself, however, as he’s failed at everything else. I’ve failed in the same way. It’s hard to explain what that feels like if you haven’t experienced it. He’s 34. An old friend tells him he’s got a fresh start and should make the most of it, but he tells her it’s too late. All of his friends have transitioned into the next part of their lives while he’s been stuck in place with his addiction, anchored down by the dead, flat weight of his unmet potential. What kind of life is left for someone who was only ever really good at self-sabotage? What kind of next step is there for someone afraid to take the first one? Oslo, August 31st is one of the very few movies ever to nail what depression feels like. Sadness? Sadness is easy. Despair is easy. Hard is feeling like you’ve disappointed everyone who ever believed in you. Or they will be disappointed, given enough time. Hard is knowing you’re the problem. It’s the last day of summer. I’ve never felt so old.
Trier’s latest, Sentimental Value, opens on a house and an unseen Nora (Renate Reinsve) wondering in voiceover if it has feelings. Does the house miss its occupants? Does it feel pain? Loss? Does it prefer quiet to hustle and bustle? Nora is a brilliant actress occasionally undone by stage fright. On opening night of her new play, she contrives to escape her grand entrance. She asks to get fucked, to get slapped; she tries to slip out of her costume, but her team seems ready for that and duct tapes her back into it. They lead her to the stage and watch her like spotters for a particularly reckless gymnast, and then her performance brings the house down. Her dad is legendary director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), who’s made a masterpiece or two but nothing of note for a long time. And time, well, time is getting short. Gustav made a movie with one of his daughters when she was a little girl. Not Nora, Nora’s sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who remembers it as the best time of her life because her father was paying attention to her, bathing her in love and empathy. But then he disappeared from their lives, playing the auteur while their mother raised them as ordinary children. Gustav’s mother, by the way, killed herself. That was a long time ago.
Gustav returns, out of the blue. Nora is now the actress and Agnes is a stay-at-home wife; both are dreading this reunion they haven’t asked for. Gustav wants to make a film at the family home. It’s about his mother’s suicide, and it’s going to be his big comeback. He has a Hollywood starlet lined up for the lead, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who’s a wonderful actor, though it doesn’t quite feel right. The part wasn’t written for her, see–it was written for Nora, who hasn’t spoken to her father in more than half her life. The script isn’t really about Gustav’s mother, it seems–it’s about how Gustav couldn’t save her and how he can’t save his relationships with his daughters, either. Mostly, it’s about how he can only communicate through his art while his family needs and needed more than that. Alas, he can’t give them more than he’s already given of himself. He’s given everything of himself. Don’t you get it? He only hopes they’ll notice before he’s dead.
Sentimental Value isn’t about the right or wrong way of doing things–the better way to communicate, the more effective way to show love, to parent, to be a husband or a son or a daughter. It’s about how we’re limited beings, and there aren’t always happy endings to our stories. The best intentions are irrelevant. All of this? All of this is hard. Upon breaking my parents’ heart the tenth or eleventh time, telling them I had left the engineering track to pursue an English degree, the last thing my mother said to me, for years, was, “Don’t write about us.” But I could only write about “us.” It’s the only thing I’m capable of writing, this saga of missed connections and things falling apart in the middle of a dense fog left as the perceptual metaphor for never being known by one’s parents and never knowing them before they were gone. Whose fault is that? Assigning fault is the coward’s way. It’s a lie you tell yourself to feel awful. Or righteous. Real suffering is knowing no one is to blame–you’re simply built wrong by people who were built wrong. Who’s to blame when magnets have different polarities? Don’t be silly.
There’s a scene in Sentimental Value where the two sisters talk in their childhood bedroom. They’ve become distant, too, over the years, having pursued distinct and separate paths in their lives. “How did our childhood not break you?” Nora asks Agnes, who says, “Because I had you.” There aren’t many films that understand so intimately what it means to be siblings raised by the same people who are, nevertheless, different parents to each of you. Nora has always envied Agnes’s time with Gustav while they made their movie together. Maybe that has something to do with why Nora became an actress: to show Gustav he chose the wrong one to lavish himself over for the duration of a film shoot. For Agnes, all she took from the experience was a more piquant sting once he turned his light away from her. At least she had his affection for a while, though, didn’t she? Isn’t that better than never having had it? What if Gustav had always shown his family as much love as he could through the art he created?, Sentimental Value wonders. What if he had been there, if not physically, then through his work? What if I show my family as much love as I can with these things I write? What if my family stops reading it? Which they will, if they haven’t already. What if they don’t come back to it until after I’m gone?
Will they know then, too late, that I didn’t withhold my love for them–I was just unable to express it in a frequency they could hear? Will it do them any good? There were two years between his heart attacks that I had my dad before he died. After his first, he landed in the ICU with a tube down his throat. I was there when he woke up, and he wrote in ghost letters in my hand a question (“What happened?”), and then “good boy.” He hadn’t told me he loved me since I was 9. I was 30 when he died. He was 54. I’m 52 now. If I were my dad, this is the year I would be tracing “good boy” in my son’s hand. Over the rest of his life, we didn’t share another moment like that, but I have held the feeling of his finger spelling “good boy” into my palm against my ear sometimes, straining to hear him tell it to me. Sadly, I don’t even remember what his voice sounds like. Or his laugh, which was so distinct I thought I could never forget it. We didn’t have the language to say the things that were important. I wish I were a better son. I wish I were a better man. Nora at last reads the script that Gustav has written for her. A single passage, anyway. It’s about pain. Loneliness. A plea to be understood, while understanding how insufficient it is and how miserable Gustav is for not being able to say it better. I haven’t been broken that cleanly since the last Joachim Trier.
Every performance in Sentimental Value is invisible and precious: the embodiment of a fully-formed human being in all their contradictions and ineffable subtlety. Fanning has a mesmerizing scene in which she comes to Gustav late one evening to tell him that while it’s been her dream to work with him, she’s the wrong actor for this part. “You’re a good person,” Gustav tells her, and Fanning’s smile lands in that sweet grey spot between “thanks” and “no, I’m not” that everyone who is pretty sure they have you fooled and hopes you don’t ever figure it out is practiced in. Thank you. I love you for saying it. I think you’re wrong. Gustav, on the other hand, means it. In meaning it, he begins to figure out that this thing he wrote isn’t about his mom, but about his kids. What if everything he’s ever written is about his kids? The closing image of the film is of a movie set. The camera cranes up, and the view resembles a dollhouse filled with these toys we loved when we were children, that we used for acting out arguments with our parents, fears of abandonment, dreams for ourselves as adults, when we would finally know how to do things and function properly and leave the sorrows and unknowns of childhood behind us. Instead, you get old, older, and you are more frightened than you ever were, more uncertain. You wonder if anyone can hear you when you tell them you love them from behind the bomb shelter you’ve built. You wonder if the ones you love most dearly will comb through your wreckage for evidence after you’re gone. I’m sorry. I loved all of you as I could. If I could talk, I would’ve told you.
