FAMILY 'VALUE'

Writer-director Joachim Trier and star Stellan Skarsgård reflect on the bond they forged making the year's most-nominated international feature, 'Sentimental Value.'

- Story by BOB STRAUSS

JOACHIM TRIER’S ‘SENTIMENTAL VALUE’ IS NOMINATED FOR AN IMPRESSIVE NINE ACADEMY AWARDS Among them the first best picture nod for a Norwegian film and the auteur himself for both directing and co-writing (with longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt) the family drama’s original screenplay.

But perhaps the film’s most remarkable achievement, Oscar-wise, is four first-time acting nominations.

Renate Reinsve, the director's muse from his acclaimed feature “The Worst Person in the World,” is a lead actress nominee for playing popular but troubled Oslo stage and TV actor Nora Borg.

Sweden's Stellan Skarsgård — whose career has run the gamut from Lars von Trier’s arty provocations to Marvel, “Dune,” “Star Wars” and “Mamma Mia!” franchise entries — is, at 74, arguably leading the supporting actor race. He plays Nora’s long-absent father Gustav, a once-respected writer-director trying to revive his career with a semiautobiographical project he needs his daughter to star in — and she wants nothing to do with.

Norwegian Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and American Elle Fanning both have supporting actress nods for, respectively, Nora’s younger, more conciliatory sister Agnes and the Hollywood star Rachel Kemp, who yearns for artistic cred and could definitely be the replacement casting that gets Gustav's movie financed — if she can handle its very Scandinavian main role.

But while suicide, wartime atrocities and intimate betrayals haunt the picturesque Borg family home, Trier does not take “Sentimental Value” into obvious Bergman territory. The four principals’ unmet personal and professional needs play out in unpredictable, funny and warm — as well as shattering — ways.