Editor’s Note: The following story contains light spoilers for “Sentimental value.”)
Criticism started nagging Joachim Trier’pp “Sentimental value” in Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix. Already, the drumbeat is getting louder for another Best International Picture contender to score multiple Oscar nominations, perhaps a record number, as actors Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning are in the mix, along with Oscar nominee Trier and his co-writer Eskil Vogt (“The Worst Person in the World”).
With its sixth game, two decades of delving into the human and artistic psyche have given Trier’s most accessible filmwhich traces generational trauma within a show business family in Oslo. Another potential Oscar contender in the “Sentimental Value” team is Norwegian production designer Jørgen Stangebye Larsen, the man who created the film’s other central character: the fairytale family’s house in Oslo.
The truth is, the filmmakers found the distinctive red gable house just a few blocks from where Trier lives. He had used it once before, on “Oslo, 31 August” (2011), which Larsen also designed. But the production designer soon realized that the house offered some limitations.
“The big windows of this house were completely covered in bushes,” Larsen said. “You couldn’t see the street. We wanted this concept of the house being a character and the windows being the eyes of the house, watching the characters come and go; also to be able to portray the time periods through what you saw outside the windows.”
So Larsen proposed that they build the whole house in the studio, “so that I could create all these time periods and change from the 30s to the 40s to the 50s, the 60s,” he said, “and also then create the time period views with virtual productions in the camera vision effects, with LED screens outside the window. So we created all of these in 3D environments, different seasons, car times, different periods. digitally in this new the technique that maybe isn’t used that much on movies like this.”
One day, as they finished filming a party in the ’60s, Trier thought, “I’m so happy I can just get out of the house and go home.” He went out and said, “Oh shit, I’m in the studio and it’s a half-hour drive.”
At the beginning of the film, we hear young Nora’s school composition about Borg’s ancestral home: It’s charming, funny, engaging. But we feel she is not telling the whole story. We see her in her bedroom, listening through the chimney pipes in the cracked wall to her parents’ conversation.
We get a ton of information in this opening sequence. “I needed a concept to thematically anchor the idea of how fast time passes in a family, to talk about reconciliation, because we don’t have infinite time,” said Trier, who wanted to give “the perspective of the house through an entertaining performance of a child’s essay. And we also learn that it’s a set-up. This is not a family where everything is fun for a teacher, but it’s fun for a teacher. We also see that underneath that fun story there’s a sense of sadness that she might doesn’t admit itself until later, which is also how the art works, but it’s the art of the American film where we learn that exposure has to be damn entertaining, and I’m proud to have made some of the funniest parts of the movies.
Years later, after her mother dies, grown-up Nora (Reinsve) must deal with her estranged, failed filmmaker father Gustav Borg (Skarsgård), when he returns to take over the family home, not just to live in but to use as the setting for a new film. He tries to convince Nora to play his mother, and she firmly rejects him.
“Gustav is convinced that the answers he seeks are still hiding somewhere in the Borg’s ancestral home,” the IndieWire critic wrote David Ehrlich. “This home contains generations of secret emotions that will only reveal themselves to those who know how to find the cracks in its foundation.”
Trier and designer Larsen mapped out the rooms and corridors for each period along with the camera movements. “We create structures of time and space,” Trier said. “How there is an emotional relationship between a living room in a corridor and a room at the back, or how we repeat people walking through a particular part of a house. So it reminds us of the last time, 20 minutes earlier in the film, when they were doing something else… (In) the room at the back of the corridor, we know what happened there with Gustav’s mother. We also know that it means a look at oneself. things are unconscious in a film, but they create the emotional the pattern for even an audience that never thought about movies in a particularly crafty way.We just feel it.
The audience needs to “understand the design of the house,” Larsen said. “So you can see the different stages of the house go through time from 1918 to today. The film is about echoes and traumas, things that pass through generations. And different scenes reflect the different characters. For example, the mother of Gustav, when she is sitting in the chair and before she decides to go and end her life, down the corridor to the end room, we see her from the back, as we also see her from the back, in Gustav’s. It is the same angle, and that angle from the corridor that looking into the living room is also where we backtrack to see how time changes in the house as the girls grow up. So that was a key angle for a lot of scenes, from the library to the dining room, we see both in the ’30s and the ’50s sequences what parts do you change for people to get that.”
Trier’s team went through all the spaces and planned the shots carefully in advance. “We’ve spent time in every location, blocked every scene,” Larsen said, “all of us playing characters, shooting stills, which end up in a visual storyboard and shot list and floor plans and all that. One sequence, for example, in the ’50s, little Gustav runs around the house and explores it. I wanted to create them all, for everyone to enter a house, more or less, for everyone to enter a house or a studio. it helps when you’re surrounded of a room that you can be in, not half finished. I like to make it 360 degrees to inspire everyone who is there on the day to take pictures and be able to explore.”
Trier and Larsen had to agree on the design direction for each period. “It’s his first film to go into that kind of period filmmaking,” Larsen said. “For me, it was about being authentic, about creating lived-in, believable environments, no matter what the time period. And it was about creating a story about how the house developed. I wanted to use as many real references (as possible) to create the interiors. The Digital Museum in Norway is a huge online archive of all the museums’ scanned images. The house can be searched by bedrooms, libr and seven. living rooms and dining rooms.”
Larsen also checked out similar houses in the same area in Oslo. “I saw wallpaper and patterns and curtains and rugs,” he said. “I wanted to create a journey that had a huge contrast from where it came from to where we end up in a white-painted house. We spent some time … to convince Joachim to be comfortable. He likes white walls, more minimalist. But we also wanted to explore time, of course. Then I found a house next to this house that had the wallpaper that I had found. It became proof that they could be like that.”
At the end of the film, when the house enters the modern era painted white, Trier accomplished the change with digital effects. The Oslo house is actually still red.