Why emotional value should win the Oscar for Best Picture | film

TIt’s a Best Picture race full of ambitious ideas and big twists. The sanctuary city saga that attacks Trump. A picaresque Jewish fantasy crossing the continent. Brazilian B-movie paranoia thriller. A crazy head trip into the alien invasion plot. A huge and tumultuous motorsport saga. Monsters. Vampires. Railway construction. Shakespeare. And, a drama about an actor’s father’s problems.

But if sentimental value seems least important among this year’s nominees, then, well, you don’t know sentimental value. From this seemingly familiar subject, Danish-Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier has created something grand and wide-ranging: a family saga that spirals across decades and generations, combined with a film about filmmaking. It’s a film as turbulent and emotionally volatile as Bergman’s, but – as with Trier’s last film, The Worst Person in the World – it tackles heavy themes with flexibility, even playfulness. No other Oscar nominee offers such a showcase for performances, with four meaty parts for its wonderful leads – all of whom are also Oscar nominees – to munch on.

Renate Rensef — who went on to build an actor-director relationship for the ages with Trier — plays Nora, an unsuccessful Norwegian stage and television actress who nevertheless suffers from unbridled, paralyzing stage fright (something she tries to combat in a very funny early scene by demanding that Jacob, the married stagehand with whom she is having an affair, either sleep with her or slap her). The stage fright likely has something to do with the completely broken relationship between Nora and Gustav, a swaggering if faded director with an absent, alcoholic father, played with languid charm by Stellan Skarsgård.

Nora’s sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilias – a true find), an academic and child star of one of Gustav’s most famous films, is only marginally less dissatisfied with her father, at least on the surface. However, neither brother was entirely pleased to see Gustave entering their family home at their mother’s heels. He arrives with a proposal: He wants Nora to star in his potential final film, the one that will crown his career, as a character inspired by his mother in the Norwegian resistance movement, who committed suicide when he was young. It’s an offer Nora flatly rejects but not to worry: Hollywood star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) is interested in the role, and with her comes the crucial funding Gustav needs from Netflix. Oh, and he plans to film the bulk of it at said family home, which he still owns thanks to some unfortunate small print in the will and a lot of Nora’s frustration.

You can see why the house inspires such dedication. A gorgeous wood-panelled, mahogany and rust-coated townhouse that made its debut at the 2011 film Trier in Oslo, August 31, and you’ll get the feeling it’s stayed with it ever since. It’s a dazzling special effect in a film that lacks the budget of Formula 1 or battle after battle, as Trier makes it clear that he moves through history – from Nazi occupation through the wild parties of the 1960s to Nora’s difficult childhood – while standing proudly unchanged. (It’s kind of heartbreaking when, late in the movie, we see his beautiful kitchen undergo a boring McMansion renovation.) We’re told that the gaping crack in its side is the result of a structural flaw in the building, but it also indicates some deep familial rift hidden in the house’s foundations. It is a place full of warmth and pain.

This complex mix of emotions is what Gustav reckons with, though his production may seem like the ultimate vanity project, as he tries to understand the truth behind his mother’s suicide. But at what cost to his daughters? Does everything have to be copycat, or are there limits to drawing art from painful personal histories? The film has fun raising these questions, not to mention directing some digs at Netflix and the industry’s general unease about anything deeper than a pond.

“Hollywood has stopped making films for adults, with some exceptions,” Scott Roxborough of The Hollywood Reporter told The Guardian in an article about the rise of the Oscars, rivaling European film awards. “That leaves room for the Europeans, who only make films for adults.” Sentimental Value leads the charge in this regard: a European film that is not very much in the English language, and yet has received as many nominations from the Academy as Marty Supreme and Frankenstein. It may not have the high concepts, sizzle, and buzz of some of the other nominees, but in its place it offers something raw, real, and satisfying.