Sentimental Value

Sentimental value is truly inexplicably beautiful film to watch and a very honest one. I think at first it's tempting to see Gustav the father as simply cruel or cold towards his two daughters. i mean- coming back like that... after everything, after not being there and leaving them with it all, trying to reconnect with a daughter he barely knows and asking her to be in his film. first impression was: this feels wrong. But as the film unfolds, it becomes clear that nothing about this family is that simple as we see it. no one is purely good or evil. they are all shaped by generational traumas and what they've lived through. Nora especially, carries the deepest weight unlike her sister. as the eldest daughter, she grew up in a loud house without anyone truly taking care of her and that absence didn't just leave a gap. it becomes part of who she is, you see it in the way she moves through the world " it's like her sadness is such an overwhelming part of her. it's a beautiful thing, but i can't tell if that's just the cause of everything, or it is a symptom of something deeper " When her father asks her to act in his film it feels selfish and cruel because how can he claim to have written her story or a character based on her... when he was never there to witness it. and of all days he came back after thier mother dies. it felt intrusive. but i think that’s the moment it became real for him... that things end, that people disappear. and that he might disappear too… before she ever understands him, or before he ever tells her that he sees her. So we see the film reveals that this is his only language as a film director he expresses what he can't express loudly, through art and that's a common thing between him and Nora. he tries to turn everything he couldn’t say into something she can read, something she can feel. so the script is no longer just a project or a story about her or his mother. it’s more like the closest thing he has to an apology. because he doesn’t know how to say i'm sorry i wasn’t present, he doesn’t know how to say i was wrong... so instead, he says: be in my film. Be in the only place where i and you know how to speak. and i think…that’s why it hurts so much for Nora, because what she needed was simple. she needed him to be there, and now he comes back with something complicated, indirect, something that still doesn’t quite give her what she needed. because even when she is surrounded by people or receiving praise she is still searching, for her father.. for recognition, for something that was never given to her by him directly. And i need to talk about the house itself and how important it feels. it wasn’t just a setting but it felt almost like a character.. a character that mirrors Nora. It holds memory, silence, and everything that was never said... even when it seems empty, it feels heavy. quiet on the outside but filled with unspoken weight from the inside. so the idea of returning to it and especially filming inside it, feels like reopening wounds that never healed. I think those are the same wounds her sister chose to avoid by not being an actress or that moment when she refused to let her son be a part of the film Gustav is making. it become clearer how trauma moves across generations in that house, they all inherited the same pain, it's less than something personal and more of a passed down wound that lives in the family itself. something all of them had been denying. and that reinforces the idea that you can not fully heal in the same space that hurt you and that spaces holds emotional weight the same way people do. i think this is why the renovating of it was a physical representation of saying: we can't keep living inside this version of our past, it's time to let go of that weight. and this is what both Nora and her father did where the final scene captures that perfectly… when she looks at him, and he looks back, smiling at each other, it feels like for a moment…they understand each other. not completely, but enough to not look away anymore. a moment of recognition, this is who you are, this is what you carried. and maybe that’s not everything, maybe not forgiveness but it’s… something. and for all of them it’s the first real thing they’ve had in a long time. It's just beautiful...how the same thing that once separated them is also the same thing that brought them back together. art is a bridge that connects people with each other.