Cannes Film Festival: Why Sentimental Value is being called 'the best film you might see all year'
Following a record 15-minute standing ovation at its world premiere, Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value is winning rave reviews and generating the biggest buzz from the Cannes Film Festival.
Did the Cannes Film Festival save the best for last? Norwegian Joachim Trier is one of the last directors to premiere in its main competition this year, but he's getting rave reactions for the film, Sentimental Value, starring Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, and Trier's longtime actor collaborator, Renate Reinsve. The film about a fractured Norwegian family is now a favourite to take the coveted Palme d'Or prize.
Actor Stellan Skarsgård had a hoarse voice at the press conference for the film, which he attributed to the post-premiere party the night before. The cast and crew had every right to celebrate – the film received a 15-minute standing ovation at its world premiere, the longest the festival audience has delivered to any film in competition this year so far. For comparison, even Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, which went on to win the Palme and four Oscars, only got eight minutes.
If applause was a barometer for what might win at Cannes, this would make Sentimental Value the clear frontrunner, although the decision ultimately lies with the 2025 International Jury and its president, Juliette Binoche. But the film also has the potential, like last year's top prize-winner, Sean Baker's Anora, to hit the sweet spot between auteur cinema, commercial viability, and attracting Gen Z to cinemas. Elle Fanning appeared at the press conference wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "Joachim Trier Summer", a nod to Charli XCX's Coachella set shout-out to the director, in which Trier's name appeared alongside other artists, of whom Charli declared 2025 would be their summer.
"I was stoked that you made that," Trier said to Fanning at the press conference. "Charli XCX gave a little hello to us, and we are super grateful. I love her music, she's awesome. I know Elle's a fan too. The problem is, I've been working so much for the last three years I don't even know what a Joachim Trier summer is anymore. But I'd like to have one." Twenty-seven-year-old Fanning declared that the Norwegian director was on her "bucket list" of film-makers to work with, and Trier's ability to speak through his cinema to younger generations was established with his last feature film, The Worst Person in the World, which was a hit at Cannes in 2021, winning Renate Reinsve the best actress prize and going on to get two Oscar nominations. It has been described as perfectly capturing so-called "millennial unrest" as Reinsve's character Julie tries to navigate her career choices and love life over four years.
Sentimental Value, Trier's sixth film, is set in a beautiful historical house in Oslo, designed to be an inherent part of the film, and is an intergenerational story, about an estranged father, Gustav Borg, played by Skarsgård, and his two daughters. The younger, Agnes, (played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) has a family and a nine-year-old son, while the elder daughter, Nora, played by Reinsve, is an actor. Gustav is a film-maker, though he hasn't made a film for some time, and tries to repair his relationship with Nora by writing a script for her. When she'll have none of it, he asks a young Hollywood star, Rachel Kemp (played by Elle Fanning) to look at it instead.
'Tenderness is the new punk'
While the film has insider jokes about the industry (Gustav gives his young grandson a DVD copy of the erotic arthouse drama The Piano Teacher for his ninth birthday) the script is being praised for its emotional depth in how it depicts the sisterly bond between Nora and Agnes, and the bittersweet father-daughter relationship between Nora and Gustav. It was co-written by Trier and his long-term writing partner, Eskil Vogt.
"I think what we wanted to do was something about reconciliation, family, and time," Trier told the Cannes press conference. "We're in the middle of life now and have a bigger perspective on the life span of a human being and realise that often inside any complicated parent there's a wounded child. And we realised that in the character of Gustav Borg, even if he's a complicated father, because he's an artist he has two languages. We wanted to talk about the vulnerability of communication, the lack of ability to talk in a family and seeing if art could play into that."
"Often families can't speak directly about important things, and we find indirect ways of communicating," Vogt added. "Art is a way of expressing that, and that's the best shot this family has about communicating well and figuring out their issues, not having the standard sitting-down scene of the family blow out and finally reaching a verbal catharsis."
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Some critics are already calling Sentimental Value "the best film you might see all year," and in the US it has been bought by Neon, an independent film production and distribution company with an impressive track record in choosing winners, including Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall and Anora, which all took home the Cannes Palme d'Or.
And even if Sentimental Value doesn't win the top award at Cannes on Saturday night, inclusion at Cannes is still a historical predictor of wider awards season success – last year Cannes premiered multiple Oscar nominees and winners like controversial Mexican musical Emilia Peréz, Coralie Fargeat's body horror The Substance and the Latvian animation Flow, as well as Anora.
Ultimately Sentimental Value's longevity will depend on its resonance with audiences, but in a time of worldwide political and social upheaval, perhaps a film centred around family reconciliation will fit the cultural mood. "I need to believe that we can see the other, that there is a sense of reconciliation," Trier said at the press conference. "Polarisation, anger and machismo aren't the way forward."
Pithily, he added that "tenderness is the new punk", explaining: "We come from a punk background, Eskil and I. We were counterculture, we didn't want to make soppy movies. But we realised through the films we've made that we've grown older and that world is a place where we can be vulnerable."
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