Norway film starring Elle gets 19-minute Cannes ovation

Director Joachim Trier found himself crying behind the camera as he shot “Sentimental Value”, his moving new tale about a quietly fractured family that got an extraordinary 19-minute standing ovation on Thursday at the end of its premiere at the Cannes film festival.

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“It sounds cheesy,” he said, “but I wept a lot making this film because I was so moved by the actors” playing members of an arty family in Oslo who cannot talk to each other despite all their supposed sophistication.

“The actors are my friends. I know that they were being halfway a character and halfway themselves. And that they were also dealing with stuff,” said the maker of “The Worst Person in the World”, which landed the Norwegian two Oscar nominations and won newcomer Renate Reinsve the best actress award at Cannes in 2021.

Many critics that year said it also should have won the Palme d'Or top prize. “We were a family too,” said Trier, rehearsing his script around the kitchen table of the beautiful old wooden home in Oslo where the film was shot, itself a character in the film. The heads that keep butting in Trier’s on-screen family are the absent father, an arthouse filmmaker who has long been put out to grass, played by Swedish legend Stellan Skarsgard, and his stage actress daughter (Reinsve).