watched the film Sentimental Value and, after a long time, I once again tasted the pleasure of seeing a truly great and truly artistic film. The film begins with a house and ends with a house.
Kabul 24: “The house” is the main character of Sentimental Value: a beautiful, living, wounded house. In the very first shots of the film, the camera circles around the house: we see the house, its cracks, its half-dark rooms, its stairs and windows and curtains, the scattered objects left behind from a past that has vanished.The narrator’s voice speaks from the house.
About what the house wants: Does it want to be full or empty? Do its walls feel tickled? What about pain?
In this film, “the house” is not merely a place where the main characters live; it is one of them, it is them. Without this house they are incomplete; they simply do not exist. It is in this house that they were born, died, committed suicide.
The film not only begins with the house and ends with the house, but the house is also meant to be the subject of a film that one of the main characters is making: he is shooting a film inside this particular house, about this particular house. The house is both the location of the filming and the subject of the film.
A film that is entirely about one specific house has been made in such a particular way that it is also about “the house-as-a-shared-human-experience”: about my house, your house, our house.
Ebrahim Soltani
