Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, is an elliptical and elusive family drama, which lingers long after it’s finished. Unlike The Worst Person in the World, his previous release, it’s not divided into chapters, but it has a similar sense of fragmentation, asking the audience to make sense of silences, truncated scenes and everything that remains unspoken in the relationship between parent and child. In particular, it asks us to greet acts of public parental grandiloquence when scepticism, especially when they occur later in life. At its core are three characters – Nora Borg, a successful stage actress living in Oslo, played by Renate Reinsve; Agnes, Nora’s sister, played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas; and their father, Gustav Borg, an acclaimed film director, played by Stellan Skarsgard. When Nora and Agnes’ mother, and Gustav’s ex-wife, dies, Gustav returns to their family home for the first time in many years. It’s clear that he hasn’t cultivated a relationship with his daughters, despite the fact that Agnes played a child role in one of his most acclaimed films. Gustav returns with a proposition: he has written a screenplay that he wants to film in their family home, with Nora playing the central role.

The ambivalence of this gesture drives the film that follows. On the one hand, you can read this as a gesture of reconciliation – Gustav reaching out to Nora, showing an interest in her career, and helping her career to flourish further, since she hasn’t yet made the transition from stage to screen. It’s also possible that Gustav’s screenplay, which seems to be based on his own family, is his way of showing Nora that he understands her pain, and so constitutes an attempt to make sense of why their relationship failed. Nevertheless, this is not the whole story. For one thing, Gustav remains slightly contemptuous of stage acting and, when Nora invites him to see her latest, critically-acclaimed production, he leaves early. Far from acknowledging Nora’s experience of his absence, Gustav’s film often feels like a mechanism for eroding her lived experience by absorbing her into his body of work. There’s also something insensitive about asking Nora to create a film in their family home – a home he absented himself from – right after her mother has died. It also emerges that Gustav’s screenplay may not be about Nora, or not entirely, but a meditation on his own mother, a member of the Norwegian Resistance Movement who was tortured during the Nazi Occupation, and who committed suicide in this same house when Gustav was seven.

If Gustav’s screenplay is the first motor engine of the narrative, the second is Nora’s decision not to star in the film. In response, Gustav hires an American actor, Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning, to take on Nora’s role, and it is this decision that draws the father-daughter relationship into clearer relief. For one of Gustav’s most defining traits is his ability to bring bonhomie to every relationship except that with Nora and Agnes; he is capable of extending a fatherly beneficence to everyone except his own daughters. We glimpse this in the camaraderie with which he greets everyone in his extended orbit – from strangers, such as a waitress, to the in-laws he hasn’t seen since Agnes’ wedding, to his extended family (he extends paternal warmth to Agnes’ seven-year-old son Erik with much more aplomb than he ever did with Agnes, or Nora, presumably because there is less obligation and responsibility bound up with the grandparental relationship). This asymmetry crystallises around his professional and personal relationship with Rachel. While this never crosses the line in a traditional way, it arguably enacts something just as sinister; Gustav’s deflection of fatherhood to his professional life. When he first meets Rachel, he spends an entire night talking to her on an atmospheric windswept beach, before planting her on a horse as the sun rises and encouraging her to take off, much to the chagrin of her press junta and security crew. In other words, he fuels her dreams as if she is his own daughter, empowering her to take on more personal and auteurist projects – to be her own woman – despite having effectively abandoned his own children for the majority of their lives.

These tendencies continue and escalate throughout the film. In one scene, he and Rachel appear on Norwegian breakfast television, and when the interviewer asks a question about Rachel’s personal life, Gustav defends her as if his daughter’s honour is at stake, actually terminating the interview, to the bemusement of the host, whose query seems fairly mild. Likewise, the film closes with Gustav hugging Rachel, holding her face to face, with an intimacy he has never extended to either of his daughters. By contrast, Nora, who is so confident and prepossessing on stage, articulate in all the nuances and subtleties of blocking, crumples whenever her father is around, in a beautiful object lesson in the body language of the dispossessed. Since her father can never quite see her, and yet is so attentive to seeing everyone else, she occupies spaces in a semi-invisible and cumbersome way. When she first sees Gustav arrive at their family home with Rachel, she retreats, unseen but humiliated, stumbling backwards, almost knocking over a vase, and absorbing the awkwardness of both klutzy moments into an awry and furtive trajectory through a hole in the back fence. She’s continually trying to get her face together, to regain some composure and to offset the shaming sheepishness that Gustav’s erasure of her entails.

That transforms Nora into another iteration of the drifting subject that Reinsve performed so brilliantly in The Worst Person in the World. With her father unable to see her, but playing the role of father to the world at large, she has no home – just a series of escalating lines of flight. Trier cuts from the interview in which Gustav defends Rachel’s honour to Nora idling lacklustre on an escalator, watching fashion advertisements featring Rachel, and from there to Nora hiking with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, who dumps her now that he has broken up with his girlfriend. Finally he cuts to her wandering along the street aimlessly with a present for Erik’s seventh birthday party, cut off from the stabilizing structures of nuclear family life. And it is at this party that Gustav has his ugliest moment, reproaching Nora by telling her quite sententiously that she needs to become a parent as soon as possible because “parenthood is something you never regret.” Divesting himself of parental responsibility at the same time he promulgates parental values publically (and implicitly holding himself up as an exemplary parent), he performs care even as he undermines Nora – a shameful and shameless display that forces her into an unbearable angularity, as she tightens and tightens until exploding with an anger that even Agnes, in the moment, criticises, which of course makes Nora projected daughterly ingratitude even harder. Unable to speak in the face of her father’s erasure, she can only cry, in the next scene, during a stage performance – a performance that Gustav pointedly doesn’t attend.

In this way, Sentimental Education charts a generation shift in parenthood and fatherhood in particular. Whereas Agnes’ husband Even seems deeply invested in their son Erik, Gustav belongs to a time when fatherhood was a function more than a relationship, an affect to be distributed to the world at large, rather than focused on actual children. To some extent, the film asks us to sympathise with Gustav in this respect, especially once we learn the backstory of his mother’s torture and his own experience of her suicide. When Trier cuts from this revelation to Gustav making films with Erik in the park, it seems like we might be in for a more conventionally reparative ending, a reconciliation between father and daughter in which we learn that the father, too, was the victim of an overbearing parent. Yet Agnes, who defended Gustav at the birthday party, is quickly unsettled by how seamlessly (albeit gently) he recruits Erik as an extra for his film, seeing in Gustav’s relationship to his grandson an echo of the way he has attempted to absorb Nora into his narrative of things. As if compelled by that ambivalence, she finally reads his screenplay, which she finds extraordinary enough to suggest to Nora, not exactly in the spirit of providing a reconciliation or justification, but as a way of coming to terms with their perennial question of their father, the quandary that has haunted them: “I don’t see how you can switch from being so close and real to just vanishing.” And yet, for all the mystique of this screenplay, Trier leaves it open that Gustav is merely a selfish manipulator too. He tells Rachel, soberly, that the footstool in their living room is the one his mother used to commit suicide, only to laugh about it being an IKEA purchase with his daughters, while he gives Erik a DVD of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher as a present to “teach him about women,” a superficially playful and provocative gesture that just reiterates that as a grandfather, as in all relationships, the “originality” of his voice and vision must come first.

These fissures in Gustav’s character and the aporia in his relationships with his daughters are beautifully encapsulated in their family home, which is in some sense the real main character of the film. The opening credit sequences pan through the house, a narrator provides us with the history of the house, and the house is where Nora perpetually puts her face back on, recomposing herself after the erasure wrought by her father as she prepares to confront the world again, if only furtively and through the back fence. In the opening scenes we see her playing the lead role in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and her panic attack before going on stage likely stems from the analogy with her own house, where she too is a prisoner – not of a husband’s presence but of a father’s absence. Paradoxically, the more that Gustav settles back into Oslo, the emptier the house seems, until it is entirely evacuated in the ambivalent final sequence. Shortly after Nora and Agnes have read the screenplay, we cut to Nora seeing Erik off for school. No sooner is he out the door than she sets up a stool and noose and prepares to hang herself. When he returns for something she forgot, she seems to have a second thought, but then, once he leaves, sets her eyes on suicide again. From there, Gustav cries “Cut!” and the camera pans back from the set of her apartment, in a cavernous studio that forms the last residual echo of the family home.

In these final moments, the film seems to insist, Nora’s erasure and trauma will always be with her – and perhaps will remain with her due to the very fact of the film she has finally decided to make with her father, which cements suicide as a horizon of her existence. You could argue that she has reconciled with him but you could also argue that she has capitulated to him, restored the relationship entirely on his terms, as she always had to do. Trier leaves it open, but gravitates towards the latter option, as the camera moves further and further back, and Nora and Gustav move closer together, but never quite embrace, hovering in a closeness that is more than professional but not quite familial. It’s a beautiful vision of the ways that performative parenthood, and the affect of fatherliness in particular, can discorrelate so radically from the lived experience of the children involved – and how the relationships that ensue remain both open-ended and foreclosed, constantly searching for an elusive shared future, for a narrative in which the child can truly feel at home.