#joachim-trier

#joachim-trier

"That was new to me, that a director took that time that early in the process to get to know the people who he's auditioning, which I thought was brilliant because he really gets to know you and you get to know him. It's a mutual testing of each other. And I had a really lovely conversation with him that made me feel very safe and respected, and I think that affected the way the audition went, to be honest."

Separating the art from the artist can be easier debated than done. In 1967, Roland Barthes infamously argued in his essay "The Death of the Author" that a writer's biography should be irrelevant to the meaning or value of their work. In 1983, Nora Ephron asserted the opposite in her novel, : "Everything is copy." Today's pop culture has tended to agree with Ephron's take: Confession fuels the biggest songs; celebrity memoirs dominate best-seller lists.

Though I haven't loved all their films, Norwegian director Joachim Trier and his writing collaborator Eskil Vogt remains among the hopes of the medium-an accomplished team whose work is intelligent, involving, thematically ambitious but very human in scale. Their latest Sentimental Value won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and it again largely revolves around Renate Reinsve, the star of their last effort The Worst Person in the World.

Renate Reinsve, the radiant star of The Worst Person in the World, here plays Nora, an accomplished stage actor whose mother has recently died. As she grieves with her younger sister, Agnes, wonderfully played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Nora must deal with the return of their long-estranged father, Gustav, played by Stellan Skarsgard. Gustav, a film director of some note, abandoned the family when the girls were still young.

The stately home in the suburbs of Oslo has sheltered generations of the Borg family. As kids, Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) and her younger sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), could hear their mother, Sissel's therapy sessions with clients through the flue of a wood-burning stove in their bedroom. They could hear their parents' conversations as well, both those mundane and tense.