Joachim Trier tearjerker takes home Cannes hearts

CANNES:

Director Joachim Trier, who won the Grand Prix second prize at the Cannes film festival Saturday, makes Scandinavian films that can melt the chilliest of hearts.

Sentimental Value, his moving story about a quietly fractured Norwegian family with Elle Fanning got an extraordinary 19-minute standing ovation when its Cannes premiere ended in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Even the director found himself crying behind the camera as he shot it, he told AFP.

"It sounds cheesy, but I wept a lot making this film because I was so moved by the actors," he said of his cast, which play members of an arty family in Oslo who struggle to communicate.

"The actors are my friends. I know that they were halfway a character and halfway themselves. And that they were also dealing with stuff," said the maker of The Worst Person in the World.

That film landed the Norwegian two Oscar nominations and won then-newcomer Renate Reinsve the best actress award at Cannes in 2021.

Many critics said it also should have won the Palme d'Or top prize. And many thought Trier should have won it again Saturday, with some calling Sentimental Value a contender for best film of the year.

"I think it was my destiny to win the Grand Prix," a rueful Trier told reporters afterwards - a reference to the failing fictional director portrayed in the film, who had also won the same prize in 1998.

"I am almost as good as him now," Trier joked.

Fanning said The Worst Person in the World - which brought Trier to her attention - is "easily one of the best films in the last decade or even longer. It is just perfect," she told AFP.

It was the last film in his Oslo Trilogy of intelligent, bittersweet explorations of life in the Norwegian capital.

'Crying and crying'

Trier is famous for the rapport he builds with his actors.

"We were a family too," he told AFP of the shoot for Sentimental Value, 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 story.

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).

"I think a lot of families carry woundedness and grief," Trier said.

The bad old dynamics are changed by the arrival of an American star - Fanning playing someone only millimetres from her real self - a fan of the father.

She comes bearing lots of Netflix dollars to revive one of his long-stalled scripts.

"We don't get too many Hollywood stars wanting to be in small Norwegian-language films," Trier joked of Fanning's interest in his films.

"When Joachim sent me the script, I read it and I was just crying and crying by the final page," Fanning told AFP.

Trier 'magic'

The director comes from a family steeped in the Scandinavian film industry. He dedicated his Grand Prix at Cannes to his grandfather, Erik Lochen, a member of the Norwegian resistance during World War II.

"He was captured and his way to survive after the war was to play jazz and to make films," Trier said.

Lochen's film The Hunt also competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, in 1960. It didn't win either. It was beaten by a film called La Dolce Vita.

Trier admitted that that history, which is alluded to in his new film, made it all very "meta".

"You're making a film about a family with your filmmaking family. And you've got a meta Hollywood star," he said.

But there are not that many parallels with his biological family.

"It's not like I'm throwing anyone under the bus. My whole family has actually seen the film and are very supportive," he said.

The filmmaker father, he insisted, is a mash-up of great auteurs such as Ingmar Bergman, Krzysztof Kieslowski and John Cassavetes. afp