Who is Renate Reinsve, the dazzling actress in Joachim Trier's "Sentimental Value"?

When she embraces her sister with all her might, stands up to her demon father, runs, escapes, too numb with stage fright, from a theater scene, chokes back a tear or flees her emotions and her prison. Everywhere, always, Renate Reinsve sparkles. The Norwegian actress, who has been starring since Wednesday in Joachim Trier's magnificent Sentimental Value , which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, the most prestigious award after the Palme d'Or (awarded to Jafar Panahi's A Simple Accident ), is not, however, a revelation.

At 37, she has already won the honors and the Best Actress Award in 2021 for her previous feature film (already grandiose) with her favorite director Joachim Trier, Julie in 12 Chapters . But Sentimental Value is perhaps the film of confirmation or of flight. Of greatness.

This perfectly melodramatic family drama tells the story of two sisters who see their father (played by Stellan Skarsgård), a renowned director, long a parental ghost, return to their lives and try to redeem himself by offering one of them (Renate Reinsve) a role in his next fiction. There are traumas, unsaid things, delicious shots (the film's introduction is a masterpiece in itself), contradictions, ambivalences, desires to feel better, and a thousand other lovely things.

On the box office front, Valeur sentimentale got off to a very good start in French theaters, attracting nearly 35,000 spectators on its first day on only 252 copies, making it Joachim Trier's best start by far.

Yet Renate Reinsve's career is far from a given. The actress was born in the small town of Solbergelva, about fifty kilometers from Oslo, to parents who worked in a hardware store chain founded by her grandfather. Far from books, culture, and art, she tells M Le Mag . She clearly speaks of a "not-so-happy childhood," but without saying more.

One day she dares to push open the door of a drama class, then is expelled from school at sixteen and sets up on her own a few kilometers from her parents' home. She then ekes out a living in Scotland, taking on a series of odd jobs, begins to carve out a marble cinephile ( David Lynch in particular) and returns to Oslo.

There, the young woman enrolled at the Norwegian National Theatre Academy in 2009, leafed through Shakespeare and Chekhov, and began performing on stage. She also made her first tiny film appearance, in Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31 (already in 2011) (which still required about ten days of filming). But she quickly returned to the theater.

She received several more or less prestigious awards, obtained a contract with the Norwegian Theatre in 2016 and played Hamlet and Antigone . The Norwegian also landed a few roles in local series, but nothing very impressive. She even considered giving up the arts to learn carpentry and joinery under the Italian sun. "I wanted something concrete, something real, to build houses. The complete opposite of the acting profession, which seemed fleeting and abstract to me," she confided to M le mag.

Fate then plays its part. Joachim Trier calls her back. He offers her a role he wrote especially for her. Chic. The character of Julie, intrepid, insatiable, in love, slender but lost, in search of something (could it be freedom or a place?), a little vain at times, is suddenly born. Julie (in 12 chapters) , this heartbreaking chronicle of the life of a young woman who doesn't know what to lead, is a hit and receives a shower of awards in 2021.

"There's a lot of emotional charge, confusion, big questions, but all of this is handled with a lot of acceptance and kindness, which is what I love about Joachim's films," the Norwegian star told Télérama during the Paris promo for Valeur sentimentale .

Since then, the thirty-year-old has been appearing in Norwegian and international arthouse cinema. She notably starred in A Different Man by American Aaron Schimberg, Another End by Italian Piero Messina, the series Presumed Innocent on AppleTV+, and The Convocation by the promising Norwegian Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, which appeared on the Croisette last year. The grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman, the latter has been Renate Reinsve's partner for several years.

More recently, the actress starred in the new feature film by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu , which won the Palme d'Or in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. And is now preparing to fly to the United States where she will film The Backrooms by twenty-something Kane Parsons, before, who knows, perhaps reuniting with a certain Joachim Trier.