Sentimental Value

95/100 Something I noticed right away was the presence of sound, not only was background noise brought to the forefront but sound interacted with the story almost as a character would, one of the ways sound was the most impactful for me, was at the end of many scenes Trier would let the background noise take over and then suddenly cut the camera to black (usually displaying a passage of time) this technique made the sound important but more important and noticeable the lack of sound; which brought me back to an early quote in the movie: *“When she read it later, she saw that she hadn’t used the word “quarrel”, but wrote of the “noise” her parents made. But what the house disliked more than noise, was silence..”   * The evident message is realizing the gaps art can fill in one’s life and how that affects them; Gustav as a character can almost only connect with people when it comes to them sharing his expression of art, this becomes evident when he is talking to Agnes and he says when they worked on their film together it was they closest he had been with her; That’s why of course he wanted his grandson and his other daughter to star in his next film. That’s also why he gave his 7 year old grandson a dvd copy off Hanekes “the piano teacher” which of course was hilarious; but it also shows his disconnect, and preoccupation with film. There are other examples of this I see his distain for theatre as an extension of this as well. Overall you can look at this film in so many ways I could go on and on about it but this really was an incredible watch. Come on we need at least one Oscar for this.