Cannes film festival

Joachim Trier’s entertaining drama sees Norwegian auteur-on-the-slide Skarsgård putting his showbiz family through the wringer in the service of his fading career

Here is an exuberant, garrulous, self-aware picture about an ageing and egomaniac film director and his two grownup daughters; it comes from Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier, who gave Cannes the marvellous romantic drama The Worst Person in the World in 2021, starring the award-winning Renate Reinsve, who stars in this one as well. The film cycles through a range of moods and ideas, and finally delivers a fair bit of that sentimentality from the title; it’s a movie of daddy issues and cinematic adventures in the manner of Fellini and Bergman, with a gag about overhearing a therapist’s session through the heating pipes, pinched from Woody Allen’s Another Woman.

Stellan Skarsgård plays preening auteur Gustav Borg, whose career is on the slide; many years ago,...