Sentimental Value is the latest in the “film within a film” setup, and one of the most interesting. As usual, a troubled artist plots his magnum opus while his relationships with cast, crew, and family reflect back on each other in disturbing and funny ways. Birdman, Drive My Car, and Synecdoche, New York come to mind—excellent company, in my view—but this film plays its premise with a straighter face; one could even call it more serious. It’s certainly more emotional: it knows that children’s grievances against their parents will never be answered, met with eternal dodges and deflections, the slippery pride of former authority. (“Everyone’s mad at Dad, huh?” pipes Stellan Skarskgaard, berated by his daughters for a lifetime of negligence.) It also knows what the family’s deceased mother, a therapist, probably knew: that reliving the past requires both authenticity and distance. When a filmmaker tries to shoot a family story in his childhood home, things go haywire; when he renovates the house and casts his family as renditions of their own ancestors, he strikes artistic—and therapeutic—gold. The opening narration of this deft, layered family study, then, is a lie: houses aren’t people; things and places only displace wounds—offering only the distraction of their sentimental value.
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