Every now and then the grandmother melancholy lists the furniture from her old house. If my mother is around, the usual bickering ensues, Why did you give them away then, if you have to give me a head like that?I didn't think you wanted them.Have I ever told you this?In any case, it happened the way it happened.

Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş is a beautiful novel that is now very fashionable and tells of a couple living abroad in an unspecified city looking for a house. The house is, obviously, a metaphor for many more things, and the book is full of things large and small. Jars bought at the flea market, spices to flavor dishes that recall distant places, lamps, jackets, books, newspapers. And that lost grandmother's furniture, perhaps ended up in other markets. Everything that makes up our small lives that we want to believe are big because we know how to furnish them.

It opens onto a house Sentimental ValueJoachim Trier's magnificent film nominated for nine Oscars yesterday. It is a house that lives and dies. That creaks and breaks. Which welcomes laughter, brawls, births, goodbyes. It is a house where, every now and then, someone comes back to pick up something they left behind: here too a vase, or the speakers of an old stereo.

But, above all, in that house people go to pick up the people left behind, whether they want it or not. In that little red wooden house in the center of Oslo, the director father (Stellan Skarsgård) imagines, after so many years, a new film just so that his daughters - an actress (Renate Reinsve) whom he would finally like to direct, the other an archivist (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) who goes looking for other objects, photos, diaries, registers, family secrets - can still believe in the life of that family. The staging serves, perhaps, to reveal reality.

Trier and his screenwriter Eskil Vogt are anthropologists for real, and have always been (Reprise, Oslo, 31 August, Thelma, The Worst Person in the World) use what are apparently details – trinkets, ornaments, psychological and existential accessories – to build a world: theirs, ours. And so the Trier cinema has become a house to live in, and which we recognize from film to film even if the guests change, and the arrangement of the furniture, and the light enters in a different way - and, at a certain point, it blinds you anyway.

Even here everything seems dark. There is one father and daughter, in particular, who no longer speak to each other. A trail of arguments, abandonments, attempted suicides, funerals. Everything in that house changes - we see it from the beginning of the century to today, through a narrative voice that seems to be that of the house itself - and which remains to bear witness to the immutable history of that family, of all families.

Trier has – literally – built a house that is inside his (and our) larger house, which is the cinema. Ingmar Bergman has always been an inevitable inspiration of his, and even more so here. Because the film – and Nora's blackout (nomen omen), the character of Reinsve – starts from the theater. For those faces superimposed by the editing which are an explicit reference to Personaas if to clear the field of any "you copied!": he tells you first. For a certain spiritualism that animates the stories of the living and the dead, who continually confuse each other. As far as it is legitimate to mix - and steal, devour, violate - between art and life which is part of so much of Bergman's cinema, from The strawberry place a Autumn Symphonyand also of his life itself. The other evening on the stage of the EFA, the so-called European Oscars, there was Renate Reinsve next to Liv Ullmann, and it seemed that time had stopped, that they were part of a single film, inhabitants of the same house at the same time.

Ma Sentimental Value they are also other film companies in the literal sense. The design porn unaware of certain Parisian apartments (or country houses) of Rohmer. Or the families divided and reunited behind Ozu's rice paper walls. Or Woody Allen's New York apartments: even in this Norwegian villa, after all, you can secretly listen to the confessions of his psychoanalyst mother's patients, through the stove that communicates with the next room.

Joachim Trier has always been a classic director, but never nostalgic. He has his eye on the present and his de-generated humanity (see The worst person in the world), and even if in Sentimental Value relies on places that are symbolically and deliberately analogue - the stage, a library, an idea of ​​cinema that is precisely twentieth-century (complete with a mockery of the obsession with moodboards and directors who have passed on TikTok) - the weight of traditionalism is never felt.

Not even in the finale. There is what concerns the various characters and their prodigious interpreters – the father, the sisters, the American actress (Elle Fanning) who arrived on that fake/real set, and all the ghosts of the past – and there is what concerns the house in which this story is set. And it is, of all, the most heartbreaking. I won't tell you how that house - which we saw crowded, ramshackle, messy, in a word: inhabited - becomes at the end of Sentimental Value. If it is more beautiful at the beginning or at the end. If grandma's furniture is still inside. It's just a question of emotional value, which is the thing, in joy and pain, that this film asks us to never give up.