Sentimental Value: Memories and Motion Pictures
Review by In the Frame participant Luca Conte.
In the Frame is a program that fosters inquiry, reflection, and an appetite for cinema. As part of our In the Frame program, up to four emerging film critics had the opportunity to watch, reflect on and review films in the Perth Festival Lotterywest Films 2025 – 26 season.
Gustav: “You playing in my film, that’s the most beautiful memory I have.”
Memories. They are the mind’s collection of lived experiences. An archive of all the information that we consume, each moment of our waking existence inputted into that intangible cerebral precinct. Everything remains stored in the brain above, recalled through whims, focused retrievals, and circumstantial sensory arousals that transport us back to a time that once was. They are catalogued from our waking present into the archive of the past, completely and ephemerally inaccessible. They exist in a dimension outside of our three, fleetingly difficult to pin down and recall. We cannot grasp, dive into, or change our memories, but many people have tried to recreate them.
Actualising them from your mind into a tangible reality is the fundamental idea around filmmaking. You take transient ideas that are unconfined and put them into stories, with definitions and visuals that reflect what they could be. They are not what you ideate exactly, but the best actualisation of that idea that one can attain given the circumstances. Memories live in the same realm as ideas and dreams, and a wide variety of filmmakers use them as the basis of their stories. And as with ideas and dreams, they are a form of escapism – to deviate from the reality we live in and dive wholly into a world that is constructed for us. One exact filmmaker that practices this is Gustav Borg, who endeavours to actualise his memories throughout Affeksjonverdi.
Joachim Trier’s sixth feature film, translated from Norwegian as Sentimental Value, sees sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) reunite with their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgaard), following the death of their mother, who returns to the Borg family home in Oslo to begin production on a film. The sisters grapple with their father’s extended absence in their lives, from his decision to pursue a filmmaking career rather than raise his family, to his newfound solid relationship with Agnes’ son Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven) and their shared love for movies. What unfolds will test the already strenuous relationship between father and daughters, as well as each character’s relationship with their own selves, on how they filter the past through the lens of the present.
Gustav Borg is the catalyst of this film. His journey to pursue art has led to a long and prosperous career at the expense of any firm relationship with his daughters. When the audience meets him, we meet him at a stage of his life where his career is in decline and his health is deteriorating, making him more conscious of the man he no longer is. However, he avoids confronting any of these dilemmas by hyper-fixating on a new project inspired by his mother, Karin. She was a Norwegian Resistance fighter captured and tortured by the German Nazi Party during the second World War, who later committed suicide when Gustav was seven years old. He proposes to film this script in the Borg family home, which Gustav’s family have owned for generations, and to recreate Karin’s final moments on film. He offers the role of ‘Karin’ to Nora, who declines before she even reads the script, refusing to accept on a whim’s notice considering her father’s absence all those years. He turns instead to Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a Hollywood actor, that once attached to the project, brings financing across from Netflix, meaning that Gustav’s memories are one step closer to being actualised. He also asks Agnes if Erik can star in his film as the son of ‘Karin’, which actualises Gustav’s childhood into a character.
The way in which Gustav Borg processes the past is by no means healthy. He struggles to communicate through words, and every conversation he has with his daughters are littered with microaggressions, because they resent his absences and he refuses to understand that. The only way he seems to communicate is through art. And so, he pours his life into cinema and builds a body of work. A body of work that has resulted in him now drawing from the memories of his childhood. But ultimately, the pursuit of recreating memories is a fallacy, as one simply cannot do it. His pursuit, like many artists, to strive for perfection, is rooted in humanity’s desire to find meaning. To find purpose. It is the reason he endeavoured to be an auteur, someone who had a distinct voice in cinema who could control all means of creative output. Films are his escape, his place to disappear into, to leave all the unresolved behind. And the cost of these endeavours ultimately resulted in alienation – from his family, his homeland, and himself. He moves away and spends much of his career in France making films.
And it is in France, at the Deauville American Film Festival, where we watch a passage from one of Gustav’s own films titled, Anna. This is the first instance where we are invited into a world that Gustav has created. The passage is filmed impeccably with a one-shot that follows the characters from a field onto a moving train, and we see that the leading character is played by none other than a young Agnes. When the two later recall working on this film, Gustav states that working with her on Anna was his favourite memory. But Agnes, rebuts telling him that felt abandoned by him, that the short-lived ecstasy of spending time with her father was outweighed by his departure once they were finished. She further states that she doesn’t want Erik to play in his film, to avoid him having the same memories that she did. Both Agnes and Nora refuse to play in his films, his fantasies, because of his desertion, those actions that now live as memories.
This convergence between the memories of others regarding Gustav’s actions, as well as his pursuit towards actualising his memories come to a head as the film progresses. Gustav processes the traumatic memories of his mother’s loss in a way that allows him control over it – through a film production. This production is the world where he can explore and process under his own terms, but he wants it to be populated with those he knows. As the film progresses, Nora comes to accept the role, coming to it on her own terms after being prompted by Agnes, who also allows Erik to play the role of Gustav. The final scene sees Karin’s recreated suicide unfold, with an eventual reveal that Nora is acting on a soundstage resembling her family home. She shares a look with Gustav, who managed to get this memory actualised. It is a look of deep understanding and catharsis. Both understand the impact they have had on each other, and that all their actions have become memories leading to this place. The integration of Nora and Erik into the film is to have Gustav’s own blood, his descendants, reenact the events of his ancestors. It is a crossroad between all temporal tenses. Memories to be made in the future, motion pictures to be made in the present, and both will move to the past in due time.
Sentimental Value’s director and co-writer, Joachim Trier uses film to process memories in the same way that Gustav Borg does. He stated in an interview with Isaac Feldberg, for Roger Ebert, that his grandfather, Erik Løchen, was a Norwegian resistance fighter during the second world war. He was captured and imprisoned by the Nazi’s before having a career in film later in life. Elements of his life can clearly be seen characterised through Karin, with their shared history during the second world war, and Gustav, who pursued filmmaking to process and find meaning in his life. By utilising the shared history from his family, from the memories of his past, he breathes life into the characters. Each is written with memories, making them three-dimensional, tangible human beings. To get that degree of authenticity from a writer/director requires those memories to live so potently in the mind that they can only be expressed through art. Thus, Trier has actualised these memories in Sentimental Value in the same way Borg does, nested into the narrative.
Now, Joachim Trier is not alone. Memory is a common tool that has been utilised by filmmakers since the dawn of the craft. Drawing on a storyteller’s personal experience brings authenticity to a work, making it more accessible to audiences and providing depth to the worlds they create. Ideation and speculation can build worlds that we could never have dreamed of, but it is through memory that we build fictional worlds that one can invest in, that feel familiar and tangible to operate within because they are populated by lived experiences.
Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 coming-of-age comedy Nuovo Cinema Paradiso follows the return of a prominent film director to the town he grew up in, interweaving the memories of his childhood and the relationship with the town’s projectionist. It shares similarities with Sentimental Value in its portrayal of a film director who returns to the place of their childhood and navigates the disturbances that arise from it. Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s 1998 fantasy-drama After Life uses the actualisation of memories as a cinema motif, just like Trier does. The film follows the recently deceased, who are interviewed by counsellors that recreate a chosen memory on film for them to take into the afterlife. These recreations provide solace to those who move on to know that there was a meaning to their existence, they ascribe a value of sentiment to their own memories. When you situate Trier’s film amongst the wider film canon, patterns do emerge from the intertwining notions of memories and motion pictures.
And this pattern can be taken further when you look at works that have autobiographical elements from the storyteller themselves, using their own memories as the basis of narrative fiction. An example of this is Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 film Mirror, which is loosely based on the filmmaker’s life. The film draws parallels to many moments throughout Tarkovsky’s life but fictionalises them into a narrative that follows a dying poet’s memories. Coincidentally, Trier cites this film as a major inspiration and has placed it amongst his favourite films of all time. Marjane Satrapi’s 2007 animated film Persepolis also plays similarly with memory. The author codirected the film, and penned the graphic novel it was based off, which follows her childhood in Iran throughout the Islamic Revolution and coming-of-age in Austria afterwards. These two filmmakers’ have drawn from their childhood memories to build narratives that actualise and confront the events they have experienced. Memories shape you, they provide the framework for your growth, and so they become vitally intrinsic to your identity. It is human to create from your own experiences, and so Trier is simply following suit.
By now, Sentimental Value has finally finished its run through the awards season, taking home 76 wins from 216 nominations across a variety of categories, topping it off with an Academy Award. This impressive run all but summates the understanding of how impactful this film is, how human it is. Each character struggles with the past coming back to the present, and the story reflects the flawed nature of humankind. Their actions and consequences have created memories that cannot be changed, that have shaped them to be the people that exist in the present. Sentimental Value is a film that recognizes the importance of lived and shared experiences. It recognizes that we exist only for a short while, and that all our actions create memories in others and ourselves. But, above all, it recognizes that film is an outlet that decorates our memories and provides the escape from reality that we so desperately crave.