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What forms our memories of childhood? How do those memories shape the adults we grow into? And how does the reconciliatory power of art put salve on the wounds and grievances we carry with us from our youth?
These are the questions at the heart of the Oscar-tipped film Sentimental Value, the searing but stealthily witty story about a preening, past-his-prime director and the emotional damage he has inflicted on his two adult daughters by abandoning them in their childhood to pursue his own ambitions.
Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard, best known for roles in Dune, Andor and Mamma Mia, plays the vain but charismatic auteur Gustav Borg, whose career is now on the slide and who hopes to stage a comeback with a biopic of his mother filmed in the family home where she took her own life.
Gustav wants his actress daughter Nora, played by Presumed Innocent actress Renate Reinsve, to take the leading role, but when she turns it down he gives her part to a famous Hollywood starlet, played by Maleficent actress Elle Fanning.
Suddenly Nora and her sister Agnes must navigate their complicated relationship with their father and the American star, who finds herself in the middle of their complex family dynamics.
“He’s better at dealing with emotions in his film work, in his art, and he’s incapable in his private life,” says Skarsgard of Gustav.
“But he wants it, he wants the contact with his daughter and he’s comically sad that he’s not doing it because he doesn’t know how to do it, but in his art, which is his refuge, he’s in control, and it’s a controlled environment, and then he can loosen up.”
Skarsgard, 70, is a father of eight, including Big Little Lies actor Alexander Skarsgard and It and Nosferatu actor Bill Skarsgard, and the role made him introspective on his own experience of fatherhood.
“I’m like Gustav, I’m an artist that loves my art, and I’m depending on my art to survive. And when it comes to time conflicts with a personal life, you feel that you’re depriving your children or something,” he says frankly.
“But I have spent eight months a year for the last 20 years, 30 years, at home, changing diapers, so it hasn’t been too much time spending on my art, but of course, it’s in my mind, and I may not have given some of the kids the attention that they feel they need, but they all have different needs.
“Gustaf (Skarsgard’s second child, the star of TV shows including Vikings and Evil), my second one, he called about the film and said ‘Do you recognise yourself?’ I said ‘No, I don’t!'”
He laughs ruefully as he recalls their back and forth. “‘Don’t you?’ ‘Yeah a little’ ‘You were not a good father!’ ‘I was not a good father? You were not a good child!’
“I mean, we’re all flawed, and I think life needs compassion and life needs forgiveness to be liveable. You can’t live without it. I’m divorced, for instance, and I love my former former wife too, and we go on vacations together and it’s so much easier if you just forgive a little.”
Nora uses her grief and anxiety from her past to fuel her acting performances, but the emotional trauma she carries manifests itself in crippling stage fright – in the opening scene of the film she is preparing to go on stage in a production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and starts ripping off her costume and asking a co-star to slap her.
“For Nora, it’s what is there from before. She carries so much emotional weight that she doesn’t understand and she hasn’t processed and she doesn’t know how to communicate,” says 38-year-old Reinsve, who is tipped for a best actress Oscar nomination for her performance.
“So when she’s on stage right before, she gets panicked, because she knows she has to open up to all of it to do the scene properly and be authentic in the scene. But when she’s in it, that gives her so much much strength and power.”
The film marks her third collaboration with Norwegian director Joachim Trier, hot on the heels of their much-lauded 2021 picture The Worst Person In The World, a romantic comedy about millennial angst that was nominated for two Academy Awards.
Asked about the key to the dynamic between the herself and her director, Reinsve is thoughtful.
“It’s hard to really understand,” she says. “It’s just like a chemistry. And I think the same kind of perspectives into some things, that we can express some things through each other. And we are having a lot of fun,” she adds with a laugh.
“I have learned so much through Joachim. He finds a way to see it’s fun how chaotic a person can be and the life they’re living, and we can laugh about it and then have fun with that on the day and just talking to Joachim is cathartic.”
Trier wrote the script after becoming a father to two children himself and the huge life change heavily influenced his latest work.
“I really wanted to talk about family and how quickly time passes, and is there hope for reconciliation?” the 51-year-old says.
“Now being a parent myself, and always being worried about failing and seeing that all my friends are grappling with their parents, even though the parents were lovely.
“It’s complicated to be a family, so a lot of that came into it, but then also my love for cinema and art and my belief that actually it matters now that we create stories of empathy and hope for reconciliation.
“I’m not trying to make a film where everything is tied up nicely at the end, but that we can maybe accept each other better as a family at the end.”
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