Joachim Trier's complex family drama

 On the surface, Norwegian director Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value seems poised to tell a conventional family story. That might have happened had Trier not placed his characters against a backdrop that includes theater, film, and acting, a choice that deepens questions his film raises about the complicated nature of father/daughter relationships.

   Stellan Skarsgard brings a weary yet calculating quality to the role of Gustav Borg, a filmmaker trying to make one last great movie, a swan song he hopes will confirm his fading stature and solidify his legacy. He's the father of two daughters with whom he has become estranged.

   As Gustav's daughter, Nora, Renate Reinsve, who starred in Trier's The Worst Person in the World, plays an actress who could make Gustav's film soar. Unfortunately for him, she harbors too many resentments (many justifiable) to accept an offer to play the movie's lead.

   In the movie's third key performance, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays Nora's sister Agnes. Less embittered, Agnes has more tolerance for a father who basically abandoned his family and has only now returned to attend the funeral of his former wife.

   Gustav's reappearance may not be motivated by grief or sentiment. Due to a legal technicality, he owns the home in which his late wife raised his daughters. It's also where he plans to shoot his film.

   Temperamental and deeply neurotic, Nora is introduced in an alarming way. She's playing the main character in a reimagined version of a Chekhov play but finds excuse after excuse not to go on stage when cued. 

   Perhaps in an attempt to manipulate his reluctant daughter, Gustav casts Elle Fanning's Rachel Kemp, an American actress  to star in his film. She's bankable, but we get the feeling Gustav knows her casting is a mistake. 

  Reticent to the point of cruelty, Gustav offers little support as Kemp struggles to find her way into the role. Numerous rehearsal scenes highlight Kemp's inability to connect to the role she's been offered; but Fanning makes it clear that the talented, committed actress baldy needs guidance that Gustav refuses to supply. 

   And on another level, Gustav knows he's asking too much of Kemp. An alcoholic, he's capable of spewing drink-fueled sarcasm, but he's not mean enough to humiliate an actress who's trying.

   Gustav's film -- his first in 15 years -- isn't his first attempt to direct one of his daughters. He directed Lilleaas as a child in the movie that made him famous. She expressed no further interest in acting. He focused on her during the filming, but then deserted the family.

    To further complicate matters, Agnes is married with a child that Gustav relates to with affection he seldom showed his daughters. 

    Tender scenes between the sisters enrich the emotional environment, and Trier adds a historical dimension to the proceedings. Gustav grew in the home he now owns and where his mother was snatched by the Nazis, who tortured her during the War.  Gustav wants to tell his mother's story, although he insists that his film is not autobiographical. 

   It's clear from the outset that Gustav wants to reconcile with Nora. Perhaps the only way he knows how to do that is to direct her while letting her talent blossom, to give her a splendid showcase. Still, his attempt also reflects the self-absorption of an artist who's thinking about what's best for his movie.

    Sentimental Value has its comic moments but Trier, working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Eskil Vogt, has made a rewarding dramatic work, one that allows gifted actors to create characters of uncommon complexity.

A young woman's shape-shifting life

    An entertaining and perceptive look at an unsettled young woman, The Worst Person in the World owes much of its success to Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve. In a performance that's vibrant and smart,  Reinsve portrays Julie, an engaging shape-shifter of a woman who turns 30 about midway through the movie.

   Like many people her age, Julie isn't sure what she wants to do with her life. She begins the movie as a medical student, transfers to psychology, and later decides that she has heard yet another professional call. She'll be a photographer. 

    She winds up taking pictures but also works in a book store.

   As the movie, develops — in 12 chapters directed by Joachim Trier from a script he co-wrote with Eskil Vogt — Julie tries on different poses, attitudes, and men.

     At times, Trier employs a narrator to tell Julie's story. His musical  choices accompany a variety of Julie's shifting moods -- from jazz to funky dance music to Art Garfunkel.

     Although Julie is working out her feelings about lots of things, she's never less than an independent woman, a fully realized character even in her uncertainty.  Men become a focal point in Julie's journey but she remains at the center of her story.

    The Worst Person in the World finds Julie in two major relationships, the principal one being with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), an author of graphic novels. 

    A decade older than Julie, Askel cautions at the outset that the relationship won't work. He's ready to settle down. She isn't. 

    It’s instructive that Julie cites Aksel’s doom-struck declaration as the reason she falls in love with him. She’s obviously not loading the romantic deck in her favor. She's not looking for smooth sailing.

    The movie deals with issues ranging from infidelity, absentee fathers, the environment, and insecurities about the possibility of   becoming a parent. Julie’s father (Vidar Sandem) has remarried and wants little to do with his grown daughter.

    But Trier isn't drawing straight lines between Julie's past and her current confusions. He's not interested in simplifying.

    Eivend (Herbert Nordrum), a barista who reveals himself as a decent sort, becomes Julie’s second major relationship. He, too, seems prepared for more than Julie is willing to give. 

    There's overlap here because Julie's relationship with Eivend begins before she breaks up with Aksel.

    In the wrong hands, The Worst Person in the World  easily could have been weightless. But Trier deepens the story, giving it a sad twist toward the end.  

    If expanded thematically, The Worst Person in the World suggests how difficult it is for Julie and some of her contemporaries to envision a future. They're not ready to follow a standard map: the grind of work, an arduous marriage, and irksome children. But they have no alternative plan, either.

    They're wary of closing any doors, an inevitable consequence of choosing a path or even stumbling onto one. 

   Unlike many movies with a bit of rom-com plasma in their bloodstreams, the characters in Trier's movie seem like real people living real lives during moments of transition. They don't always do the right thing. Sometimes they try. Sometimes they don't. 

   Perhaps that explains the movie's exaggerated title: Julie's living through a moment when she feels that she may not be doing anything right or accomplishing anything significant -- or anything all.

   Does Julie reach a moment of great realization? 

   Maybe, but whether she does or not, Trier paints a smart, amusing portrait of a woman who has yet to determine who she really wants to be. You get the feeling that she's definitely not alone.

She has powers she can't control

There are few new stories, only new ways to tell them. That may be important to remember as you watch Norwegian director Joachim Trier's Thelma, a coming-of-age tale in which Thelma, a first-year college student played by Eili Harboe, learns about the power of sexual desire. Thelma's separation from her parents (Henrik Rafaelsen and Ellen Dorrit Petersen) creates the situation in which her emerging sexuality bumps against the walls of repression established by her religious mother and father. Trier's chilly style fills the screen with images that rattle Thelma and us along with her. Some of these images occur during the seizures Thelma begins to have. Doctors can't pinpoint any cause for Thelma's distress, which seems to be exacerbated by her burgeoning friendship and sexual attraction to another coed (Kaya Wilkins). Eerie and full of disturbing sights, Trier's movie proves engaging enough to squelch criticisms that might arise from a plot that many have compared, with some justification, to that of Carrie. Whatever you make of Thelma, it's difficult to ignore Trier's ability to unsettle an audience. Besides, Harboe ably suggests a woman on the precipice of terrifying discoveries. Together, Trier and Harboe create a state of sustained unease that penetrates nearly every frame of the movie, and Thelma becomes a movie that's not so much about telling a story as about creating a world that matches Thelma's interior life. Thelma grapples with a mysterious force that she hardly comprehends but must learn to accommodate. Is this force a psychological response to religious repression? Is it something real or something imagined? Can Thelma really make things happen in the world external to herself? Trier wisely leaves us looking for answers, giving Thelma a feeling of tantalizing ambiguity.

Dealing (or not) with a terrible loss

A Norwegian director makes his English-language debut with Louder Than Bombs.

Norwegian director Joachim Trier (Reprise, Oslo, and August 31st) makes his English-language debut with Louder Than Bombs, an intimate portrait of a father and his two sons, men who can't move on after the death of the wife and mother (Isabelle Huppert) they lost.

Huppert's character, who's seen mostly in flashbacks, wasn't only a suburban mom: As a celebrated war photographer, she won acclaim for her portraits of human devastation. She and her husband (Gabriel Byrne) sometimes fought over her need to endanger her life by pursuing the kind of indelible images that often win prizes. Her work also threw her into prolonged fits of depression.

No wonder, then, that Huppert's character perished in a head-on collision near her home, not in some remote corner of Afghanistan. She may have been like those military people who see terrible combat and have trouble ever going home again. She'd seen too much.

In one way or another, father and sons all are foundering.

A one-time actor who has become a school teacher, Dad is having an affair with another teacher (Amy Ryan). Their relationship must be kept secret because the family's youngest son (Devin Druid) attends the high school where both Byrne and Ryan's characters teach.

The older son (Jesse Eisenberg) is a father himself, but he's not really committed to his marriage.

Trier establishes this dissatisfaction early on when Eisenberg's Jonah meets an old girlfriend (Rachel Bresnahan) in the hallways of the hospital where his baby has just been born. Jonah allows Bresnahan's character to jump to the conclusion that there's something seriously wrong with his wife (Megan Ketch), perhaps that she even died.

The youngest boy -- Conrad by name -- hasn't been told that his mother's death was a suicide, something one of mom's former colleagues (David Srathairn) is about to reveal in a piece he's writing for The New York Times.

The screenplay brings father and sons together when Eisenberg's Jonah shows up to sort through negatives left by his mother, an unexamined cache that may contain pictures that belong in an upcoming retrospective of her work, the occasion for the Times article.

Trier likes to bring his camera close to his characters' faces, which -- in some ways -- serves as a source of irony: The camera closes in on these characters, but seeing them in close-up isn't the same as knowing them. These close-ups also help convey the impression that the characters have difficulty seeing beyond themselves.

Druid's performance as an angry teenager tends to dominate the proceedings, but Byrne is entirely convincing as a father trying to keep his composure when faced with his youngest son's terrible recalcitrance. Eisenberg holds up his end of the bargain in a smaller role as an unhappy young professor who doesn't seem particularly interested in getting to the bottom of his discontent.

Trier bravely deals with difficult subjects and his style -- which involves shifting times and alternating points of view -- keeps the material from lapsing into melodrama.

Sometimes the movie engages in Rashomon-like structural ploys, showing the same incident from two points of view.

In one these, Byrne's Gene can't resist following his very unhappy teen-age son. He wants to know what the boy's doing. The same incident takes on a new meaning when repeated from the young man's perspective.

Despite a willingness to explore the aftermath of grief, Louder than Bombs has so much on its plate that it can't quite anchor its emotions. Trier gives us plenty to chew on and, perhaps, not enough to digest.