CANNES, France — It took nearly until the end of the festival, but the Cannes Film Festival has its first outright sensation.
Joachim Trier's ''Sentimental Value'' premiered Wednesday night to the kind of rapturous response that Cannes is fabled for. The film, starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning, marked Trier's follow-up to his lauded 2021 film ''The Worst Person in the World.''
There's stagecraft that goes into Cannes' famous standing ovations, which makes the timed applause reports an often inaccurate reflection of how movies are received at the festival. But the thunderous ovation for ''Sentimental Value,'' at 15 minutes, was the most rousing of any film in Cannes by a large margin.
''What's that Buñuel quote? ‘I make films for my friends?''' Trier said, addressing the crowd. ''I feel you're all my friends tonight.''
Trier's remark, while Fanning wiped away tears, was a poignant reference to ''Sentimental Value.''
Reinsve, who starred in ''The Worst Person in the World,'' plays the actor daughter of a well-regarded filmmaker, Gustav (Skarsgård), who has put moviemaking before parenting most of their lives. When he writes a script for her, she immediately refuses. Gustav instead casts a young Hollywood star (Fanning).
Much of the film is set around their old family home in Oslo, in which Gustav wants to make his film. As ''Sentimental Value'' proceeds, it gently unveils questions of family and home that have as much to do with artmaking as for fathers and daughters.
After Charli xcx concluded her Coachella set with a screen declaring, among others, a ''Joachim Trier Summer,'' Fanning sported a shirt with that phrase Thursday in Cannes. But Trier may have coined a new slogan for shirts, himself: ''Tenderness is the new punk.''
