Outstanding film.
This Norwegian drama about family relationships got a long standing ovation at Cannes, and was nominated for nine Oscars. It won the Grand Prize at Cannes, and the Oscar for the Best International Feature Film, as well as the corresponding BAFTA.
IMDb: 7.8
Tomato Meter: 95%
Popcorn Meter: 94%
After the death of their mother, sisters Nora and Agnes reunite with their estranged, once-famous director father. He tries to revive his career with a personal film project. When Nora, a professional actress, refuses a role, it leads to confrontations about art, legacy, and family trauma, in this humorous and heartbreaking film.
The writer/director, Joachim Trier, is obviously our kind of guy. In addition to creating a brilliant movie, he inserted a brief breast shot that is completely unnecessary. It’s more than “unnecessary.” I still haven’t figured out why it’s there at all. It’s an outdoor scene, about two seconds in duration, that’s kind of stuck into the middle of a dark indoor scene. My best guess is that it was to be part of a different sequence that was abandoned in the final cut, but the director decided to make use of it as a “flash of memory” in the narration. I assume that’s also why it is slightly blurry, like a memory. The film has many themes and one of them is our connection to our past through memories.
Although the topless scene is about two seconds long, I made a 20-second clip to demonstrate how awkwardly the outdoor scene fit into the surrounding action.
They did quite an amazing job of de-aging Stellan Skarsgård in the flashbacks. A couple of scenes may have been created from old footage of him, but there are other scenes that were obviously performed by old Stellan and de-aged with AI. It looks exactly the way he used to look.
Trivia:
So there is a popular, long-running podcast, for those who don’t know of it, called “How Did This Get Made?” where Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, Jason Mantzoukas and sometimes guests comedically discuss “bad” or bad movies.
One of their classic episodes is for “Deep Blue Sea,” the movie where scientists experiment on sharks by injecting some kind of heightened protein into their brains, searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s. It blows up in their faces. Stellan Skarsgard plays one of the scientists.
In the podcast, they mention that auto-correct changes Stellan’s name to “Stellar Skateboard.” People have gone into Stellan’s Wikipedia page so often to change his name to “Stellar Skateboard” that Wikipedia has locked his page to updates.
” he inserted a brief breast shot that is completely unnecessary. It’s more than “unnecessary.” I still haven’t figured out why it’s there at all.”
An American may find it unbelievable that if it is not unusual to sunbathe topless in one’s garden in a country then no specific reason is needed to show a woman topless. It is just there, just like in other European movies when a woman wakes up and gets out of bed and she’s naked. Not for a specific reason, only because many people sleep naked, so this is the natural thing, so it’s natural to show it.
Good point. As in life itself, nudity just happens.
That being said, I don’t even recall that topless scene in Sentimental Value. It seems that it was over in a flash. I really liked the film as a whole – it has stayed with me.
I was thinking about that with the K2 scene posted the other day, how it’s the sort of scene you rarely see in an American movie nowadays, where the nudity doesn’t so much “add something” or be “necessary”, as it is just showing the lived reality of the characters
I understand what Scoopy was referring too, watch the clip in context, the topless shot makes no sense. Dancing…insert topless, with kid looking…back to dancing.
Makes no logical sense why it’s there (if it’s a deleted scene) other than the director wanted to insert a cut scene that didn’t make it in the movie.
He’s not making the point that European values vs. American, etc.
gratuitous – lacking good reason
Seems the director put it in because he could, but because it made sense, which is the point he seems to be making here.
So I wouldn’t be reading into it that much or adding sociological element to it, that I don’t think added anything to the discourse here or got to the matter of what Scoopy asked “why was the scene in the film”?
You missed the point completely. It’s exactly two seconds of topless sunbathing inserted into a dark disco scene. People that watched the film don’t even remember that it was there!
(And I lived in Norway for years, by the way!)
Shame the film didn’t show off Renate Reinsve more, she’s cute.
Renate is amazing & has LOTS of nude scenes in The Worst Person in the World, by the same director
And about a zillion other places.
Lots of Reinsve here.
The “search” area is your friend.
Just a brief additional commentary about the film from my perspective. Stellan Skarsgård’s character is the fulcrum around which the plot revolves – and he is excellent in the role. But the emotional core of the film is not actually his relationship, or lack thereof, with his two daughters (whom he largely abandoned and is now trying reconnect with), but the relationship as between the daughters. That becomes more apparent as the film progresses. Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas are also excellent in their roles as the daughters. The house in which it was largely set should also have been nominated for Best Supporting Residence (😛).
I really appreciated this film and would give it a strong recommendation to any who have not seen it yet.