San Francisco Frontiers - Trier misses out on top Cannes prize again

"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 being 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 I 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.

"And talk often doesn't help. It gets argumentative. We get stuck in our positions, the roles we give each other unconsciously."

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.

"It is so emotional. It's a very personal piece for Joachim and you can just feel that rawness in it."

- 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 movie, 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.

The "magic" that Fanning said Trier creates on set comes from taking your time, he told AFP, taking on the big themes with a light, humorous touch.

"Anyone who's had experience of therapy -- and I have -- will know that it's about the silences and letting things arrive. Very often (that) is also the case with actors," said Trier.

"We had quite a few moments like that in the film actually. Renate would look at me and I look at her and I say, 'What was that? That was interesting.' And we don't talk about it anymore.

"But when people see it in editing, they go, 'Wow!'"

C.Diaz--SFF