Joachim Trier’s ‘Sentimental Value’ sends Cannes swooning

CANNES, France (AP) — It took nearly until the end of the festival, but the Cannes Film Festival has its first outright sensation.

Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” premiered Wednesday night to the kind of rapturous response that Cannes is fabled for. The film, starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning, marked Trier’s follow-up to his lauded 2021 film “The Worst Person in the World.”

There’s stagecraft that goes into Cannes’ famous standing ovations, which makes the timed applause reports an often inaccurate reflection of how movies are received at the festival. But the thunderous ovation for “Sentimental Value,” at 15 minutes, was the most rousing of any film in Cannes by a large margin.

“What’s that Buñuel quote? ‘I make films for my friends?’” Trier said, addressing the crowd. “I feel you’re all my friends tonight.”

Trier’s remark, while Fanning wiped away tears, was a poignant reference to “Sentimental Value.”

Reinsve, who starred in “The Worst Person in the World,” plays the actor daughter of a well-regarded filmmaker, Gustav (Skarsgård), who has put moviemaking before parenting most of their lives. When he writes a script for her, she immediately refuses. Gustav instead casts a young Hollywood star (Fanning).

Much of the film is set around their old family home in Oslo, in which Gustav wants to make his film. As “Sentimental Value” proceeds, it gently unveils questions of family and home that have as much to do with artmaking as for fathers and daughters.

After Charli xcx concluded her Coachella set with a screen declaring, among others, a “Joachim Trier Summer,” Fanning sported a shirt with that phrase Thursday in Cannes. But Trier may have coined a new slogan for shirts, himself: “Tenderness is the new punk.”

Trier explained to reporters how he and co-writer Eskil Vogt came from a punk background and were initially hesitant to make “sobby movies.”

“But we realized through the films we’ve made that we’ve grown older and the world is a tough place, and maybe we need to be vulnerable and show characters that are vulnerable,” said the Norwegian director. “So we kind of came to the conclusion that tenderness is the new punk. For me, it is. It’s what I need right now — I need to believe that we can see the other, that there is a sense of reconciliation, that polarization and machismo isn’t the only way forward.”

The debut of “Sentimental Value” immediately made Trier’s film a contender, if not the clear favorite, for Cannes’ top award, the Palme d’Or. Should “Sentimental Value” win on Saturday, when Cannes draws to a close, it would extend the indie distributor Neon’s unprecedented streak of Palme d’Or wins. Neon has backed the last five Palme d’Or winners in Cannes, including last year’s Oscar-winning “Anora.” This year, it also acquired another film that could be in the mix, Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent.”

Should “Sentimental Value” win over the jury headed by Juliette Binoche, it would be the first Norwegian film to win the Palme d’Or.

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