HEART TO HEART

Joachim Trier's approach to directing is as empathic as his films.

- BY MARGARET TALBOT

Trier, whose breakout film was "The Worst Person in the World," encourages actors to make "mistakes” in pursuit of emotional truth.

If you walk through the elegant neighborhood of Frogner, in Oslo, you may notice a house that doesn't fit in with the understated apartment buildings and embassies nearby. It's not that the house is ugly or rundown. Rather, it evokes a cottage from a fairy tale. Clad in dark wood with a steeply gabled roof, it has squiggles of cherry-red trim, like decorations on a birthday cake. Norwegians call such architecture dragestil, or "dragon style," a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic recalling Viking ships and wooden-stave churches. To Joachim Trier, the Norwegian director whose new film, "Sentimental Value," is partially set at this address, the house is "a bit like Pippi Longstocking's. There's a feeling of something wild and soulful in the middle of something more mannered and polite."

Although it's a cliché to say that a place can be as much of a character in a movie as a person, it's a cliché that Trier has made his own. In three of his previous six films—"Reprise" (2006), "Oslo, August 31st" (2011), and his breakout hit, "The Worst Person in the World" (2021)—Oslo has been far more than a backdrop. His characters are constantly roaming the city, and Trier highlights its melancholy beauty: its lush but empty-looking parks; its moody indigo fjord.