One thing is clear: Renate Reinsve does not want to work with Stellan Skarsgard.
In the first trailer for Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, which Neon dropped today, Reinsve plays Nora Borg, a stage actress with a once-famous film director father Gustav (Skarsgard). Gustav was an absent dad and the two are estranged, so when Gustav, after the death of Nora’s mother, offers her a role in his new film, the project he hopes will be his comeback, she turns him down.
Undeterred, Gustav offers the role, written for Nora, to the young Hollywood star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), dropping the eager American actress right in the middle of the complicated Borg family dynamics. In a breakout role, Norwegian actress Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays Reinsve’s sister Agnes.
“Why didn’t you want to do the role? He wanted you to do it,” asks Fanning’s Kemp of Reinsve in the Sentimental Value trailer. “I can’t work with him,” Nora replies. “We can’t really talk. My father is … a very difficult person.”
Sentimental Value premiered in competition in Cannes, where it received an ecstatic 15-minute standing ovation.
“For what might have been a standard family melodrama in less capable hands, Sentimental Value is uncommonly rich in emotional rewards,” The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney noted in his rave.
Sentimental Value is Trier and Reinsve’s follow-up to the 2021 romantic dramedy The Worst Person in The World, which won Reinsve best actress honors in Cannes and picked up two Oscar nominations (best original screenplay, best international feature). As with Worst Person, Trier co-wrote the film with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt.
In the trailer, the scenes of the Borg family drama are cut to the strains of The Faces’ “Oh La La” (“I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger”), a tip of the hat to Trier’s exquisite choice of needle drops in the film, which includes such deep cuts as Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl” and Labi Siffre’s “Cannock Chase.”
Neon is bowing Sentimental Value in select cities on Nov. 7, setting the film up for an awards-season run.
Check out the trailer below.