In a cinematic panorama saturated by spectacle, irony, and estrangement, Joachim Trier's declaration that "tenderness is now revolutionary" repositions the emotional as political, reframing vulnerability as dissent in the face of a cultural machinery dominated by detachment and hyperrationality; Sentimental Value, his latest film acclaimed for its nine Oscar nominations, crafts a luminous, restrained drama of intergenerational grief and artistic mediation, in which familial bonds are neither idealised nor pathologised but portrayed as fractured yet repairable through action and silent presence—eschewing verbose therapeutic tropes, Trier opts for a visual dramaturgy in which unspoken pain, inherited trauma, and the limits of language become aesthetic material; the narrative, where a renowned filmmaker (played by Stellan Skarsgård) seeks reconciliation with his daughters through the staging of a film, embodies the cinema-as-mirror model that Trier attributes more to Ozu or Almodóvar than Bergman, despite the inevitable comparisons—the film is less a metacinematic device than an exploration of memory’s ambivalence and the interiority of rupture, where silence is not a void but a locus of unspeakable transmission; in one luminous sequence, the actress-daughter rehearses a line she cannot say to her father, and that restraint, that refusal to verbalise, becomes the very architecture of redemption; Trier’s own family history—his grandfather’s internment by the Nazis—inflects the film’s moral backbone: that to remember without transmitting pain is a delicate ethical act, and that art can, perhaps, mediate without repeating; ultimately, Trier argues for a cinema of reconciliatory optimism, in which the screen becomes not a wall but a soft threshold, offering audiences the radical gesture of emotional honesty in an age of reflexive distrust.
