Renate Reinsve returns home with soulful ‘Sentimental Value’

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about Renate Reinsve. In films such as “The Worst Person in the World,” “Armand,” “A Different Man” and now Joachim Trier’s sublime family drama “Sentimental Value,” the Norwegian actor, 38, has spent her last four-and-a-half years onscreen flirting recklessly, laughing uncontrollably, screaming in rage and dissolving in tears, all with an utterly unpredictable vitality that has made her perhaps the most exciting performer working today.

But you cannot simply ask the subject of your cover story what has made her the current cinema’s rawest nerve. So, inspired by her latest project — in which she plays Nora, a mercurial actor whose father (Stellan Skarsgård) returns from years of estrangement hoping to cast her in his autobiographical new film and shoot it in the family home — I ask Reinsve to join me on a historic house tour instead.

“I always feel people become more themselves when they’re in their house,” Reinsve tells me on a cloudless autumn morning at Hollyhock House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1921 premonition of California modernism. But for an actor, at least one preparing for a role, that self can begin to fray at the edges: Thus Reinsve, an avowed architecture buff in the midst of her second major renovation, found herself unmoved by “Sentimental Value’s” ravishing 1892 Dragestil (“dragon style”) manse.

“At some point I lose overview of who I am and who the role is,” she says. “It’s like I can’t tell the difference... When I came to the house, and houses are very important to me, I didn’t feel anything. I wasn’t connected to it. And that is very Nora. And I was embarrassed to tell (Trier,) because I didn’t realise that process had happened. I never do.” That Nora contains so many correspondences with Reinsve’s own experience — a grandmother who lived through the Nazi occupation of Norway, a turbulent home life, a younger sister who acts as protector — only intensifies the blurriness, and in turn the performance. “Sentimental Value” is darker, subtler work than “The Worst Person in the World,” less receptive to the viewer’s embrace but ultimately the richer for it; it is the film released this year that I most yearned to see a second time.

“I never sat down and thought, ‘I’m going to speculate on this and this and this in her own private relationships,’ but of course I know her history,” says Trier, who first cast Reinsve in a one-line role in his 2011 film “Oslo, August 31st.” “I remember pitching it to her before the screenplay was done and explaining that what I wanted to work on was something with some light and hope through this very fraught relationship and I remember her being very emotional when we talked about that. And I thought, ‘She gets it. She knows what I want to talk about.’”

For Reinsve, who grew up in the forest village of Solbergelva, outside Oslo, fraught relationships, particularly with her mother, inculcated a rebellious streak: By her own admission she was kicked out of everything from the girl scouts and the family business — her grandfather’s hardware store — to, eventually, home and school. She lived with her grandmother for a spell, supported herself for another and eventually fled to Edinburgh, Scotland, while still a teenager, working in a hostel bar for a year before returning to Norway.

From her blended family of whole, half- and stepsisters, Reinsve remains closest to her “rock,” Cecile, a teacher who also serves part-time as her assistant, and sometimes spends hours on the phone discussing a shared love of science (most recently quantum mechanics) with her father, a computer engineer. Despite her intimations of trouble at home, however, she also vividly describes moments in her childhood that fed her burgeoning creativity, whether discovering Pink Floyd in her mother’s record collection, being gifted a photo development kit or finding solace in theater, which swiftly became the only subject in school that interested her.

“I was asked to leave a lot of places,” she recalls, laughing. “I was just very messy, very chaotic... But all of these times I’ve been asked to leave places, I’ve taken it as an opportunity. And the one place I’ve never been asked to leave is in acting.” With her breakout performance as the romantic heroine of Trier’s 2021 film “The Worst Person in the World,” for which she won the best actress prize at Cannes, cinephiles finally caught up to the filmmaker, who says he wrote the script expressly for Reinsve because “I’d waited 10 years for her to break through and no one gave her a lead part.”

Shortly before filming on that project commenced, he remembers, he had lunch with Isabelle Huppert, who had just seen Reinsve onstage in Oslo and raved about “this one young actor in the purple dress.”

“Isabelle is fairly critical, so a compliment from her no one should take easy,” Trier remarks of the French actor, whom Reinsve herself describes as an idol. “And I said, ‘That girl is going to play the lead in my next film.’”