Then there’s Fanning, always a magnetic presence, who makes Rachel so much more than the stereotype of a naive Hollywood starlet—her overly enthusiastic, constantly phone-tapping team members are walking parodies (and very funny, earning some knowing chuckles at Cannes), but she’s free-spirited, smart, curious, and empathetic, someone who reaches out to Nora herself and refuses to be her rival. She also has one highly emotional scene that totally floored me. Come next awards season, a supporting-actress campaign could very well be on the cards.
But, to be clear, this is Reinsve’s film. Already glorious in Worst Person, she kicks things up another gear here, delivering an even more mature and heart-wrenching turn—from her pre-performance anxiety to her eye-rolling skepticism of her father, her heartbreak, uncertainty, dissatisfaction, need for affirmation, and the depression she slowly dips into, every single beat is so perfectly calibrated that it feels utterly natural. Over the past few years, the now-much-more-international Academy has developed a habit of nominating at least one lauded international performer in the best-actress category, from I’m Still Here’s Fernanda Torres to Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller, Roma’s Yalitza Aparicio, and Elle’s Isabelle Huppert. This year, that slot should surely go to Reinsve.
Considering Worst Person got best-original-screenplay and best-international-feature Oscar nods, too, Sentimental Value should also expect to do well elsewhere, and is, unquestionably, this year’s first serious best-picture contender.
And it couldn’t be more deserving. There are so many pleasures to be found in it—the swooningly beautiful way in which it’s shot, its painstaking design, its laidback, low-key, eternally aspirational Scandi aesthetic and costuming. But, in the end, none of that mattered to me, because emotionally, the film hit me like a truck. Like life, it is both sad and side-splittingly funny, strange and imperfect (a dream-like interlude which combines Nora, Agnes, and Gustav’s faces, for instance, doesn’t really work, but you admire the swing anyway). In its precise understanding of modern life and its persistent questioning of it, it’s everything contemporary cinema ought to be. So, I say to the Cannes jury: just give it the Palme already, and be done with it.
