Where the previous film had modernist flourishes (detached narration, stopped-time fantasies), the new venture is constructed along broadly classical lines. Once, a prologue informs us, there was a house, which came to be inhabited by a family that in its present iteration comprises two grown daughters: one sensible, married, a mother (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas), the other a self-doubting, childfree actress (Reinsve once more), first seen being strapped into a corset so as to complete her latest stage performance. At a family funeral, the pair are reunited with their distant father (Stellan Skarsgård), who crucially misses the service but shows up for the wake. (We get the idea: he hasn't been there as much as his girls would like.) He has his reasons: Dad - who goes by the grand old name of Gustav Borg - is a mighty film director, celebrating a half-century in the business, and he's returned this way in part to offer Reinsve's Nora a role in his latest production. Is this a sincere attempt to reconnect, or too little too late? Either way, she turns him down; to take her place, Borg recruits a wide-eyed American star (Elle Fanning), who believes her director to be the greatest thing since sliced ryebread, and - in a coup de grâce of tactlessness - announces his intention to shoot the project in his own backyard, i.e. the family home he walked out on some decades before. So the emotions get messy-ish, but the form throughout remains as reassuringly neat and tidy as a freshly opened box of tissues on a therapist's table. Borg's late wife, we discover, was a shrink, perhaps defeated by her husband's issues; the therapeutic aspect of Trier's cinema remains a large part of its appeal. Much as the house contains a family at various stages of its existence, so too the film becomes a vessel within which these characters can work through their issues.
The fault with Sentimental Value lies not with the filmmaking, its fixtures and fittings - all supremely tasteful, the polar opposite of von Trier's wilful provocations - rather with these characters and their (decidedly first world) problems. One of the pleasures of Worst Person was the sense-memory Trier and Vogt conjured of being young in the big city, full of beans and ideas if short on money, faced with choices, possibilities and temptations everywhere you run. This pair are still writing what they know - the notional pith of the new film is much the same interpersonal conflict they've always written about, in various modes and across multiple genres - but they're different people from who they were five or ten or fifteen years ago, and circulating among a different, more settled class of people than they did during their restless experimental phase. Now they tour the festival circuit, as Gustav Borg tours the festival circuit; they sit down for interviews with press and curators, as Gustav Borg does; they meet with actors, as Gustav Borg does; and at the end of the day, as Gustav Borg does, they doubtless return to bright, spacious, well-populated abodes filled with life and light. These people are pleasant enough: even Gustav proves more paternalistic grump than Bergmanian ogre, reserving his greatest ire for the wholly deserving target of a TikTok troll hoping to get an on-camera rise out of Fanning's vulnerable ingenue. But now just about everyone on screen seems too upright for the down-and-dirty business of creating drama: I was never especially persuaded that these people make for compelling movie characters, not least because they so visibly have all the resources they need to resolve or otherwise assuage their own self-made dilemmas.
These modern bohemians either needed to be more extreme to grab the attention - von Trier would have made one of the Borgs a sex- and drug-crazed maniac, and I can't honestly say that wouldn't have made for a more invigorating experience - or made more interesting in some other way. The sensible sister spends precisely one scene sitting in a library turning up the family's WW2 backstory - which could have provided a rewarding, Transparent-like counterpoint to the movie's genteel affluence - but this line of inquiry is quickly dropped; too grim, you can hear Joachim and Eskil say, let's not frighten the horses. At worst, then, these characters are mildly inconvenienced, people who've got to do what they want, been amply rewarded for the task, and still find themselves unsatisfied in some way. (At which point, the therapist in me - apparently played by Queen Latifah - sat back, sighed, and could be heard saying: honey, there's only so much I can do for you sitting here.) The drama that results has the properties of marshmallow: it's soft, sweet, slips down easily enough without putting too many calories on your hips (another New Year's concern) and slowly lulls you into a gentle slumber, as borne out by the old dear four seats down from me who nodded off around the hour mark and started loudly snoring. Worse: there's nothing much to wake you up if you do find yourself beginning to drift away. Skarsgård is good, and the beneficiary of one of Trier's better jokes that point towards character: handing over DVDs of Irreversible and The Piano Teacher to his six-year-old grandson, he's the image of misplaced affection. Yet if you set Sentimental Value against either of those films, or even the chastening life experience of the more conventional Worst Person, it's two hours plus of flicking through the IKEA catalogue: new money, converted into mildly eyecatching style. I can understand why it drew the interest of a Cannes jury formed of directors, screenwriters and actors, and why the artisans of the awards circuit may yet be swayed into voting for it: like an expertly filtered Instagram snap, this altogether flattering portrait is literally designed to make people like them look good. I just couldn't really see what was in Sentimental Value for the rest of us.
Sentimental Value is now playing in selected cinemas.
