Sentimental Value: Preview Club Wrap-Up

As part of the JBFC Preview Club, subscribers get an exclusive first look at the most interesting new indies and foreign films on our “New Releases” horizon. Every month, JBFC programmers present a special “secret” screening of an anticipated new film release before it is available to the public. After the screening, our programmers open the floor for a robust audience discussion and send Club members a wrap-up note with behind-the-scenes details and fun facts about the film they just watched.

As a special treat, we have decided to make these notes public. Beware, there may be spoilers!

Preview Club Wrap-up for Sentimental Value, presented by JBFC Film Programmer Ian LoCascio on Nov. 11, 2025:

Hi all,

Thank you for another wonderful Preview Club screening last night! I’ll be returning as host for the next season of Preview Club and, as a reminder, we will be going out with our on-sale email for next season the week of November 17^th—so please be sure that your premium level memberships are current so you receive the emails. Subscriptions go on sale for members at the Film Sponsor, Film Enthusiast, and Silver Screen Circle levels on the 17^th, and then for members at the Film Buff level on the 21^st.

This month’s Preview Club title was Sentimental Value—which opens at the Burns on Nov. 21, courtesy of our friends at NEON Rated.

Sentimental Value was directed by Joachim Trier and had its world premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Prix by the festival jury, presided over by actress Juliette Binoche.

Joachim Trier’s previous film The Worst Person in the World also had its world premiere at Cannes, where the film’s lead actress, Renate Reinsve, received the award for Best Actress. While Reinsve, who also starred as Nora in Sentimental Value, had her undeniable career breakthrough in The Worst Person in the World, that was actually her second time working with Trier. Prior to collaborating with Trier on The Worst Person in the World, she appeared in a very small role in his 2011 film Oslo, August 31^st, where she only had one line—but Reinsve left such an impression on Trier with that single line that, when he made The Worst Person in the World a decade later, Trier and his longtime co-writer Eskil Vogt wrote the lead role specifically for her.

Oslo, August 31^st and The Worst Person in the World form the second and third entries in what has been described as Joachim Trier’s “Oslo Trilogy,” which began with his first feature-length film Reprise in 2006. All three films star Anders Danielsen Lie, who had a small role in Sentimental Value as Nora’s co-actor with whom she has an affair, and who also appeared in September’s Preview Club film The Summer Book, where he played the grieving father of the film’s young protagonist.

Joachim Trier was raised and currently lives in Oslo and, before deciding to become a filmmaker in his 20s, he spent his teenage years as an avid skateboarder who shot and produced videos of himself and his friends skateboarding around the city. It should be noted that, when Trier was a teenager, skateboarding was banned in Norway and skateboards were deemed “unsafe toys” by the Norwegian government, so the act of skateboarding in Norway at that time took on a kind of countercultural dimension. According to Trier, you had to have your skateboards smuggled into Norway from Sweden, where skateboarding was allowed.

Joachim Trier’s wife Helle Bindixen Trier, an architect and experimental theater artist, has described Joachim’s time as a skateboarder as foundational in the development of his love for the city of Oslo, since he spent so much time skating around and immersing himself in the city. I also think it’s fair to say that Trier’s skateboarding videos, which involved shooting and editing videos and setting them to music, served as a precursor to his filmmaking career. I don’t think it’s coincidental that one of Trier’s greatest technical strengths as a filmmaker—one he first honed with those skateboarding videos—is the way he shoots and edits his films around music.

Trier is a lifelong lover of music who is known to pop up at clubs around Oslo to do guest DJ sets, and he personally selects all the music that plays in his films. But beyond just having good taste in music and choosing fitting songs for his films, I think he’s excellent at integrating those songs into the film itself and having each shot and sequence almost dance along to the music. In addition to the strong needle drops in Sentimental Value, I think the original score by composer Hania Rani is also excellent.

Last night I talked about how much I love a party scene set to the song “Deceptacon” by the band Le Tigre in Trier’s film Reprise, which I think so beautifully captures the way that a song can transform the energy in a room and change the way people act and bodies move. This is appropriate as Trier is, above all else, a filmmaker who is interested in people and the interpersonal dynamics between them—whether romantic, familial, artistic, or some combination of all the above. Here is a link to the party scene in Reprise.

Beyond taking place in the city of Oslo, the films in Trier’s Oslo Trilogy (each of which, I should say, are excellent and absolutely worth watching) center on young people who are ostensibly part of the upper middle-class Norwegian intelligentsia, and many of whom are artists in some form. Considering how Joachim Trier makes wordy, playful, sharply-written character studies about young, intellectually grounded urbanites who live in and are inextricably bound to a specific city which the filmmaker loves deeply and also calls home—it comes as no surprise to me that Joachim Trier’s work has drawn comparisons to the films of Woody Allen, who Trier, in turn, acknowledges as being a major influence.

Another filmmaker whose work feels like a notable point of reference for Trier in Sentimental Value is a filmmaker who also made a seismic impact on Woody Allen as a filmmaker—the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Joachim Trier has described his biggest takeaway from Bergman’s work as being the “extreme, aggressive intimacy” of Bergman’s closeups. Trier has described such intimacy as allowing the audience a closeness to the actor, which breeds empathy, but also a degree of mystery and unknowability.

The tension between empathy and unknowability is one which feels pretty central to Sentimental Value, both as it pertains to the inter-personal dynamics and challenges faced by the characters in the Borg family, but also to Joachim Trier’s approach as a filmmaker. Trier is unafraid of, and seems, if anything, to be drawn to this element of the unspoken, or the unknowable elements which make people who they are, and in exploring these inner depths, he treats his characters with such empathy and tenderness, even when they’re at their lowest or least likable points.

The great Stellan Skarsgård, who plays Gustav Borg in the film, has described what he thinks is Trier’s distinguishing quality as a filmmaker: “his fixation with the actors’ faces. He sees everything you do. He sits beside the camera, not looking at the monitor. Because that is his material. It’s not what you say or the dialogue—it’s what happens on the faces. As an actor, it’s a gift to have a director who is so interested in what you do when you don’t do the text.”

Some of the greatest faces in the history of cinema have appeared in Scandinavian films like Sentimental Value, from the iconic close-ups of Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc to the face of Ingrid Thulin as she delivers her extraordinary monologue in Bergman’s Winter Light.

And there is a long history of great film and filmmakers from Scandinavia—with Bergman and Dreyer chief among them—but the stereotype of Scandinavian film is, generally speaking, one that is dark, bleak, heavy, and austere. This is a stereotype which, as much as I love Bergman and Dreyer, they don’t do an especially good job of disproving—nor does Joachim Trier’s distant cousin from Denmark, the ever-polarizing provocateur Lars von Trier. While it’s far from a cheerful walk in the park, I think that a film like Sentimental Value, along with Trier’s filmography at large, helps to break free from that stereotype.

At the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, Joachim Trier declared that he thinks that “tenderness is the new punk,” and I do think there is something to the idea that, in our contemporary moment when cynicism and irony rule the day—the hopeful, optimistic ending to a film does almost start to feel more daring and unexpected than the tragic one. Sentimental Value is a wise, novelistic film, rich with thematic heft and emotional complexity; and, among the many things I appreciate about the film, I really do admire Trier’s bold decision to end the film on a note which, without feeling cloying, strikes me as being pretty unambiguously hopeful.

I hope that you enjoyed Sentimental Value as much as I did, and I look forward to seeing you next month for our final Preview Club screening of the season!

Best,
Ian