Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve are back, following up their highly acclaimed, gut-wrenching rom-com “The Worst Person in the World” with a new festival darling: “Sentimental Value.” Like with their last film together, the director and his lead actress didn’t back down from bringing challenging emotions to the forefront.
“We ultimately want to build cinema so that we identify and feel human things,” Trier told TheWrap. “The challenge of working in that story or art form, whatever you want to call it, is that the unknown, the absence, is the interior mind of the characters. So what we’re trying to do is through situations, gestures and dialogue — not too much — to build to a moment when there’s just pure being.”
Trier and Reinsve sat down with “Sentimental Value” stars Elle Fanning, Stellan Skarsgård and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas to speak with TheWrap’s Joe McGovern at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival on Friday. At the top of the conversation, Trier, Reinsve and Skarsgård spoke about building a quiet moment between the two lead characters, an estranged father and daughter in a highly troubled relationship.
In “Sentimental Value,” Skargård plays Gustav Borg, a past-his-prime filmmaker who casts American movie star Rachel Kemp (Fanning) in a role rejected by his daughter, Nora (Reinsve), for his new, tragically autobiographical project. Gustav and Nora’s fractured relationship often keeps them at odds (“It’s a ton of antagonistic scenes,” Skargård said of his relationship with Reinsve).
But Trier, Reinsve and Skarsgård spoke fondly one moment between the father and daughter — a scene that, according to Trier, comes at the exact halfway point — where they quietly share a cigarette.
“Everything else is tension between us,” Skarsgård said. “It’s one of my favorite scenes. It’s the only scene I have with her that is not against you.”
“We were sad after that scene,” Reinsve said. “We talked a lot about how we wanted more scenes (like that).”
Skarsgård is a new addition to the Reinsve/Trier collaboration, who first worked together on 2011’s “Oslo, August 31st” before Reinsve took on a leading role in 2021’s “The Worst Person in the World.” “Sentimental Value” immediately made a name for itself in the festival space, receiving rave reviews following its Cannes Film Festival premiere and winning the Grand Prix prize back in May.
“I really love those spaces in a movie, any movie, where you actually give space to the audience silence to fill it in with what they have and what they’ve seen and all the projecting that they’re doing,” Reinsve said. “We were talking, that’s actually the only place you see the positive potential in their relationship.”
Though “Sentimental Value” isn’t romantic in the same sense as “The Worst Person in the World,” Trier likened the film’s structure to that of a rom-com — the coupling here simply happens to be paternal.
“The audience can look at these two and the kind of sad love story of father daughter, and this kind of having a cigarette. And we know that there was a lot said, but we didn’t need any of that dialogue,” Trier said. “You guys are great actors, so just trusting that and trusting that that moment will mean something.”
