Sentimental Value

This film caught me completely off guard. It’s beautifully shot. But emotionally it’s incredibly jarring. It has ignited so many emotions within me and wtching  it felt like a roller coaster.  I felt anxious, relieved, sad, and sometimes strangely comforted.  What stayed with me the most is how deeply humane all the characters are. No one feels like a villain. Even the father, I reaaallly tried to hate him, but I couldn’t. I understood him, at least to a certain extent. A huge part of who he is seems shaped by grief. He was -is- grieving his mother, and I believe that grief quietly defines so much of how he behaves. It doesn’t excuse the way he failed his daughters AT ALL, but it explains the emotional distance. And in the present, you can almost feel the guilt he carries for that absence, the realization that he wasn’t there for them when they needed him :( There’s a line in the film: “We can’t talk.” And I think that line explains him perfectly. He simply doesn’t know how to communicate. Words fail him. Instead, he makes films. The more I thought about it, the more it felt like filmmaking is his crooked and imperfect way of connecting with his family. In one of his earlier films Agnes acted. Now, he wants Nora to be part of this one. Even his grandson becomes involved. It almost feels like these films are the only language he has, the only way he knows how to give pieces of himself to the people he loves. The moment that completely broke me was the prayer monologue when Agnes had convinced Nora to read the script:  “Praying is* acknowledging despair. Throwing yourself on the floor because that’s all you can do. Not unlike lying with your heart broken and thinking: Please call me. Please forgive me. Please  take me back.”        *                                               That scene made me cry. It captured something so raw about loneliness and regret, the moment when words fail you and all that remains is the simple admission that you cannot carry everything on your own☹️ In the end, I believe what made this film so devastating is the realization that sometimes love is there but the language for it simply isn’t spoken by everyone. And that, in itself, is its own tragedy.