Every award season in Hollywood, I enjoy watching some of the movies that are up for awards. I don’t put a lot of weight into who wins, but I’m always interested to see who gets nominated. Today I want to highlight two stand-out films that both explore themes of parental abandonment — and two very different paths toward healing: Sentimental Value and Rental Family.
Parental abandonment doesn’t show up in a singular way. It can be having a parent who is physically present but never emotionally available. It can be a parent who drifts in and out. It can be a parent who exits at some point in childhood — or who was never present at all. But parental abandonment leaves a mark on the way a child interacts with others and the world. It continues to shape a person’s life well beyond their childhood years.
If a child is lucky, they have a parent who tries to find a path back towards them. However, many times there is no resolution with a parent and healing has to come from a different path.
Sentimental Value
Sentimental Value is a Norwegian film centred on two daughters, Nora and Agnes, whose mother has just died. Their father, Gustav, a once-famous director, re-enters their lives after many years of absence. He approaches Nora, now a successful actress, and asks her to star in the latest film he’s written. Nora refuses even to read the script.
The movie isn’t singular in focus. While the central tension revolves around whether Gustav and Nora will resolve their conflict, we also learn about various mental health struggles, Gustav’s difficult childhood, and the charged symbolism of the family home, a place that holds both joy and pain. We get to witness Nora & Agnes relationship as sisters and how they navigate the ruptured relationship with their father. Both have different perspectives on the route forward.
I loved the depth of character and plot in this film. This isn’t a tidy Hollywood production where conflict is resolved with the right words spoken at the right time. It asks harder questions:
How do you connect with someone when both parties aren’t aligned about repairing the relationship?
When do you push towards reconciliation and when do you step back?
Is there a value in forgiveness or are some things unforgivable?
Is an apology necessary for forgiveness?
Rental Family
Rental Family follows Phillip, a white American actor living in Japan. After a brief moment of fame, he is now struggling to find steady work. He’s recruited by an agency that hires actors to portray family members or friends in real-life situations (hence the title).
Phillip is hired by a woman named Hitomi to play the absent father of her daughter. After two failed attempts to gain admission to a private school as a single mother, Hitomi intuits that the presence of a father figure might strengthen her daughter’s application.
Phillip gets hired to be part of a variety of family situations. While questioning the ethics of his job, he also finds himself enjoying the depth of the roles he gets to play with these individuals. He starts to form real connections with these “rental families” that he doesn’t have in his personal life. He finds himself in situations where he debates whether to stay “on-script” or choose his own path. These roles also nudge him to face some of his own family wounds of abandonment.
This is another layered film with characters & plots that aren’t simple. Phillip has to explore his own white American bias. The Rental Family agency has to confront the impact of the work on it’s employees. Each employee has situations where they choose to go off script with varying results.
Just like with my favourite books, I also enjoy movies with depth and nuance of character. I love the character who isn’t purely the hero or the villain.
Have you watched either of these movies? What did you like or dislike about them?
If you have any movie recommendations that you enjoyed with similar themes let me know.
