Let’s get the somewhat silly, broadly true yet also ultimately surface-level point of comparison out of the way first: if “Sentimental Value” had a chaotic evil twin, it would be Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s fraught family drama and meta film production parable mashup “The Beloved.”
Where Joachim Trier’s now-Oscar-winning film ultimately feels like it is generally hopeful about the capacity of art and cinema to connect us just as it allows for some key ambiguities to linger, Sorogoyen’s latest increasingly centers on how toxic families, as well as film productions, can be. It writes what can feel like the equivalent of a hate letter to the movies (or at least the potential for abuse that can come from how they’re made) before eventually coming to his own halting emotional upswing about the enduring power they still hold. It’s then a work that seems to love the ultimate impact that films can have and is also profoundly anxious about the way that they are made.
The resulting experience is a film that’s as consistently well-acted as “Sentimental Value,” with leads Victoria Luengo and Javier Bardem both giving layered performances that prove painfully authentic, even if it doesn’t quite reach the same heights as that film did. Even when “The Beloved” (“El ser querido”) is not as layered as its leads are, often feeling like it’s building up to something more before petering out and leaving both actors at constant risk of being stranded in the desert along with their characters, just getting to see them share various tense scenes is fascinating to watch.
This is true right out of the gate as the film, which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, opens with an extended sequence of the two just talking in a restaurant. Locked in on their faces in extreme close-up with everything else serving merely as background noise, we already get a sense of how the patriarch Esteban (Bardem) and his daughter Emilia (Luengo) have much that is unresolved between them.
Though both are initially trying to be polite, everything from the small talk they make to the way they alternatively gobble down or just poke at their food establishes how neither is entirely comfortable. There are even moments where one obscures the other, as if each is jostling for space in the frame. It’s an effectively discomforting opener where you feel the tension in every micro-expression and halting line of dialogue as the two leads never miss a step even as their characters do constantly.
When Esteban then offers her the lead of the new movie he wants to make, Emilia is shocked. This was the last thing she expected and she needs a moment to gather herself before even beginning to talk with her father about it. She’s concerned about how people will respond, but he assures her that she needn’t worry.
Though he says so with a calm disposition, we’ll soon feel in Bardem’s alternatively charismatic and cruel performance that this is a man who is clearly used to getting everything he wants. After this extended opener concludes with Emilia agreeing to take part in the production, perhaps against her better judgment, she’ll soon wish she had never acquiesced to her father as the simmering tension the two already felt comes bubbling up to the surface.
Though Esteban is initially moderately understanding of Emilia needing some time to get used to being on a more expansive film production for the first time after primarily working in television, this doesn’t last long. Once he begins to get stressed about the way certain scenes are going, with the key one involving a dinner that spirals out of control, he starts to lash out. Gone is the supposedly kinder father and in his place is an angry tyrant who is hellbent on getting the scene right. Even if he has to humiliate his cast, traumatize child actors in the scene or put his crew in an impossible position, that’s what he’ll do.
That the film they’re making, a 1930s-set historical drama about Spain’s colonial exploitation of western Sahara, often looks like it could be actually terrible only makes this tension more painful. Nobody deserves to be treated horribly on a production, but when this is the film that all the fuss is over? It’s hard not to laugh at just how quickly Esteban goes off the rails. Then again, it speaks to how this is not about the art itself, but about the insecurity of a fragile man and father who desperately wants to hold onto control.
Bardem is terrifyingly good in these moments, but none of this would work if Luengo weren’t able to go toe-to-toe with him. We feel her anger at being put back in this position again, her desire to still do her part to finish the film, and the tension of her performance within the performance in every aspect of how she carries herself. Even when the film’s formal shifts, where it cuts to black-and-white as well as what seems like more handheld BTS-esque cameras, can distract from the great work she is doing, they can’t smother her entirely. If anything, this proves rather thematically apropos that she is able to uncover richer emotional ground despite all that is frequently undercutting her.
As the film then becomes about the production nearly coming apart and many of the crew walking off in protest of the way Esteban is behaving, it’s unfortunate that Emilia fades into the background for a good stretch. Even as they’re all clearly united in their frustrations with her father, we don’t really get much sense of her relationships with the other crew or a chance to just sit with them other than in brief glimpses. It dulls many of the emotions that the story is attempting to tease out before, when she returns back to the film’s center, it finds them again.
This extends to an ending that is both seemingly more romantic about what is ultimately made just as it is reluctant to fully embrace the final result. The score, itself a sense of tension that existed in the background of the film within the film, then becomes the music that it leans on to bring it all home, opening up a whole other series of messy contractions that go pointedly unresolved. Is the magic of the movies all it takes to really paper over something that was an inescapably bad situation?
That the movie they were making still looks bad only makes it that much more of a fittingly brutal note to end on. Where “Sentimental Value” found some closing notes of grace, they’re few and far between as “The Beloved” mostly leaves with the sense that you should probably just never make a movie. Or, if you’re going to, mostly certainly don’t do so with your absent, emotionally manipulative father. Best just go make your own movie about him instead and spare yourself the grief.
