Finding Love: “Theirs and Ours”

Have you ever believed you didn’t count?
Abandoned by people you love? Nora and Agnes, daughters of Gustav Borg in the movie Sentimental Value, felt as children do when a treasured balloon suddenly is sucked away into the world. Sad, mad—vulnerable. When their father came to their mother’s memorial, they bottled up all their deep emotions blaming him for leaving the family and the hurt that followed. But what saved them, said Manohla Dargis, New York Times film critic, was “finding love: ‘theirs and ours,” the sustaining holy work that healed the hearts of the father and his daughters.

Challenging Relationships
Dargis describes the entangled father and daughters’ relationships as “…greedily self-involved and irresistibly charismatic, the kind who are easy to fall for and tough to let go.” Sentimental Value resonates with unwavering themes of resiliency, self-reflection and a conflicted love with intense highs and lows. Slow moving and layered with ambiguities and symbolism, the film is a tender, complex and poetic film that leaves much for the audience to absorb. . . and aspire to.