Copyright newrepublic
The pièce de résistance among Gustav’s myriad acts of emotional manipulation was enlisting Agnes, then not yet even a teenager, to star in one of his most famous movies—a wartime drama about an orphan on the run. By holding his younger daughter so close, he made it that much worse when, inevitably, he left for good. In the aftermath, Nora was left to care for Agnes and their ailing mother, Sissel; the latter’s death after a long and painful illness catalyzes the movie’s plot. Looking hale and hearty, and carrying his latest screenplay in hand in lieu of flowers, Gustav shows up for Sissel’s funeral and gets down to business. He offers Nora the lead role in the movie, claiming that he wrote it specifically for her: an offer she can’t refuse. Beyond the fuzzy math of trying to substitute his estranged daughter for his sainted mother—a part that will oblige her to pantomime hanging herself on-screen—Gustav is giving Nora his version of the high-hat. Over lunch, he claims that the movie will give Nora a chance to prove her chops beyond the stage and television roles that he considers to be beneath her—and, by extension, beneath him as well. If Nora was four-fifths fucked up already, Gustav’s proposal sends her spiraling toward the 100 percent mark. And that’s before Rachel Kemp shows up in Oslo looking distinctly like her doppelgänger, with her blonde hair dyed brown and a dodgy Norwegian accent. Gustav’s Plan B, it seems, is to forge ahead without niceties or permission; as ever, the movie is the only thing that matters. Besides driving Nora into hiding, Gustav’s production effectively displaces Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) and her husband and son from their home, which Gustav still owns. He then pulls the puppet strings even tighter by offering Agnes’s son a role, effectively instrumentalizing the impressionable kid as a flesh-and-blood prop-slash-collateral—the mirror image of his transgression a generation ago. The question of whether Gustav is an emotional terrorist, a control freak, or simply a spectacular asshole—and whether those qualities are necessarily commensurate with being a successful filmmaker—is at the heart of Sentimental Value, which gets considerable mileage out of Skarsgård’s status as probably the most decorated Scandinavian actor since Max von Sydow. His credits working for the mercurial likes of Lars von Trier and Bergman—whom the actor derided as “manipulative” during the movie’s press tour—serve elegantly as shorthand for the idea of the director as a sacred monster, and Skarsgård gives a marvelously jagged, high-comic performance, all good spirits and bad vibes. Gustav carries himself in expectation of a hero’s welcome at all times, and fairly exhales self-regard, as if high on his own supply of rarefied air; he’s the sort of person who enters a room and gangs up on its inhabitants all by himself.
