Sentimental Value: The weight of being unseen
- Mar 22
- 3 min read
Dysfunctional families have been haunting the history of cinema ever since. As we all know, if all happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And that way is always worth being told.
As I watched the end credits of Sentimental Value flashing before my eyes, I knew something happened. I knew it would be a movie to take in, and slowly process.
After The Worst Person In The World, Joachim Trier came back to tear our hearts apart again, successfully. With a cast proved to work magic together, Sentimental Value looks like the natural successor of Trier’s previous movie. If The Worst Person In The World portrays the mid-twenties quarter-life crisis, when you question yourself and your life choices, Sentimental Value seems to delve deeper in the big question we’re all afraid to ask – why am I like this?
With a blend of family drama and generational trauma laced with unrequited love, Sentimental Value has a more mature and painful introspective gaze. The look-at-yourself-in-the-mirror and come to terms with your past wounds kind of gaze.
Nora is in her thirties and still lost, struggling with mental health and unstable relationships, with an emotional baggage bigger than her childhood home, cracked and crooked as her life feels like. The troubled relationship with her father, made of unspoken words and misgiven affection, resembles a stack of piled up dirty laundry nobody dares to wash. The loss of her mother makes unsolved issues resurface, while the relationship with her sister Agnes is the only safe space of unconditional love.
Trier is incredibly good at showing without telling, often conveying the characters’ inner life through the power of a shot. So the crack in the house becomes a metaphor for the family story, Agnes’s digging into her grandma’s history of torture gives her some of the answers she needed, and an acting Nora bursting into tears blurs into a real Nora dealing with her pent up grief.
Trier’s language is subtle and deeply symbolic. A cut sequence blending every family member’s face into the other conveys the deep unbreakable bonds tying the Borgs together, the emotional blueprint impossible to get rid of. Through a meta-cinematic technique where we see stories inside other stories, Nora embodies the family trauma taking up the role of her grandma, in a matrioska of symbolisms running through the theatre, the house, and references to Trier’s previous work.
Fans will for sure remember the iconic smoke scene in The Worst Person In The World, and how the smoking brings Nora and her father together here. A shared cigarette in their messy universe means a brief moment of wordless truce, and a silent evidence of shared flaws and identities.
Sentimental Value touches sisterhood, father-daughter relationship, miscommunication, and the need to be seen. Nora is desperate to be seen by her father, who himself doesn’t know how to show the affection he claims to feel. Grown up believing of being unworthy of love, and starving for her dad’s attention, Nora tries to find meaning in a life full of voids. Eventually, through a silent gesture that screams I see you and I always have, the wounds perhaps start to mend.
At the end of the day it’s like watching a therapy session, going through pain to start healing and releasing and slowly rising from the ashes. We all are a bit emotionally illiterate in our own way, with a wounded past. Trier gave voice to that. Sentimental Value is not only an emotional portrait of dysfunctional family dynamics, it is a cathartic portrait of human relationships, relatable as it is.
