words by J.A.G. Mabbutt
Sadly enough, when the word ‘parent’ finds itself propped up in my mind, the words of the miser poet, Philip Larkin, fountain into existence from the furthest regions of my memory – “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra, just for you.”
These lines, extracted from Larkin’s 1971 poem, This Be The Verse, often saturate the margins of my perspective on the reverence of parents. But that is my story, and Larkin’s poem isn’t in my crosshairs today. Instead, on the topic of parents, Robert Lowell’s Home After Three Months Away focuses on the strain of parent-child relationships. Lowell’s poem unashamedly invites the reader to observe the speaker's thoughts and feelings as they return home after being away for three months. At first, such an absence might prompt readers to judge the speaker; however, sympathy does emerge once the reason is revealed: treatment at a psychiatric hospital. Presented as a confession or a journaling of an earnest return to domesticity and the parental role, the poem dares to erode any triviality and instead makes itself significant in its hypersensitive honesty.
Sentimental Value follows sisters Nora and Agnes in their reunion with their estranged father Gustav.
On the cinematic front, the theme of an absent parent can be found in abundance. But truthfully, not many films do the justice it deserves. Joachim Trier’s 2025 film, Sentimental Value, is a raw and, at times, viscerally uncomfortable watch. It isn’t a horror film, however. It isn’t punctuated with graphic scenes of sobering distress, or violence and gore. Instead, like Lowell’s poem, it forages for its discomfort in the domestic, in the sinewy relationships of a father and his two adult daughters. For acclaimed arthouse director Gustav (Stellan Skarsgärd), the role of being a father is less of a priority than his creative endeavours. Now at an older age, Gustav’s attempts to bring to life a part-biographical, cinematic retelling of his mother’s suicide and his own youth as a boy bring him into closer contact with his own children. His daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), an actress and a historian respectively, exist in tandem, as the survivors of their father’s neglect. For Nora, who is shown to struggle with stage fright and depression, her father’s absence is both physical and communicative, a languageless relationship that Gustav finds difficult to alter. In Agnes’ relationship with Gustav, the absence is plugged by Gustav’s ambition to indulge her son with cinematic trivia as a means of connection. Trier’s film, like Lowell’s poem, is complex and without a topography to easily map out the messages they intend to distil. Because of this, both the film and poem organise their ideas through the means of witnessing the difficulties of parent-child relationships in flux or an organic state.
Home After Three Months Away – a poem by Robert Lowell
Gone now the baby's nurse,
a lioness who ruled the roost
and made the Mother cry.
She used to tie
gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze–
three months they hung like soggy toast
on our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English sparrows
weather a Boston winter.
Three months, three months!
Is Richard now himself again?
Dimpled with exaltation,
my daughter holds her levee in the tub.
Our noses rub,
each of us pats a stringy lock of hair–
they tell me nothing's gone.
Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was child's play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush...
Dearest I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear.
Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.
Three stories down below,
a choreman tends our coffin's length of soil,
and seven horizontal tulips blow.
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen; now no one need
distinguish them from weed.
Bushed by the late spring snow,
they cannot meet
another year's snowballing enervation.
I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.
In Lowell’s poem, the tiering of imagery helps the reader envision the experiences of the speaker upon their return to the chaos and sensory textures of domestic life. Whether it is the “gobbets of porkrind,” “sky blue corduroy,” or a “shaving brush,” the poem’s speaker carefully absorbs us through their descriptions of tools or objects that tokenise their life. However, amongst this chaos, the absurdity of the speaker’s discomfort is amplified through the simile “Dearest, I cannot loiter here in lather like a polar bear.” Here, the speaker appears to be in dialogue with his daughter, with the term “Dearest,” implying a possessive love or endearment. However, despite the playfulness of the simile and the imagery of a polar bear caked in shaving cream, there is a deeper sense of alienation abroad. Not only is a polar bear a creature that is distinctly ‘out of place’ in the domestic location of a bathroom, but its cuddly appearance is a contrast to its behaviour as a predator. Here, the speaker recognises how he both looks and feels out of sorts in the environment he has returned to. To his daughter, he might still retain the outward appearance of her father, who, like a teddy bear, is a comforting presence, but inwardly, he knows that he is different, displaced, or even a risk due to his mental illness. Lowell uses this language to recognise the speaker’s struggles and doubts about being a positive father figure. Like a polar bear lathered in shaving cream, not arctic snow, Lowell’s speaker feels unsuited to what is expected of him.
Whilst Trier’s film isn’t inclusive of such metaphorical imagery to nail home Gustav’s unsuitability to be a father, it is rich with moments of abrasive friction where the triangular relationship between father and daughters produces clarity. Initially, Gustav’s resistance to being the father that Nora needs is illuminated at her mother’s wake, where Gustav repeatedly reminds his stage actress daughter that he doesn’t enjoy attending the theatre. Rather than beaming with pride or exhibiting the intent to support his daughter, Gustav’s paternal characteristics diminish, and in their place, he expresses himself as an opinionated artist, rather than a father. Gustav’s inability to fill the role of a father is fundamentally defined by his communication style, more so with Nora, but most definitely with both his daughters. Some might perceive this as a symptom of his own childhood trauma, where his mother’s suicide and his unsettled life eroded his ability to sustain a relationship through sincere conversation. For Agnes, her investigation of her grandmother’s past gives her the ability to recognise Gustav’s own issues with generational trauma, and because of this, she can soften her views of him and allow him marginally into her life. Sure, his attempts at being a grandfather to her son Erik are solely characterised through the language of cinema, where the young boy is gifted two avant-garde, mature films for his birthday, or invited to act in his grandfather’s film, but in this, we see evidence of the only way that Gustav can express and communicate. To Gustav, the medium of cinema is his only way to voice his doubts, feelings, and thoughts, and to Nora, this becomes evident at the end of the film. Despite her initial rejection of his attempt to cast her in the role of a character inspired by his own mother, Nora later accepts the role, recognising that she and her father will never communicate as she wishes, and that instead, through the cooperation of making a film, they might both be able to subtly converse about how they feel.
This is symbolised in the final scene, where Nora performs the crucial scene of Gustav’s film, where her character sends her son, played by Erik, off to school, and later hangs herself in the house. The scene and nod of recognition between Gustav and his daughter solidifies Trier’s message about the difficulty of parent-child relationships, gesturing towards acceptance rather than complete rejection. Nora and Gustav might never have the relationship of their dreams; instead, for them, their connection is nuanced and involves mutual trauma. Through the art of cinema and acting, they recover the means of communication, mobilising their creativity as an intimate collaboration that allows them to exhibit their vulnerabilities and strengths in a mutually beneficial environment. Aside from this moment, we might be able to translate this better by looking at an interaction between Nora and Rachel (Elle Fanning), the acclaimed American actress who initially replaced her role in Gustav’s film. Despite Gustav’s encouragement, Rachel begins to feel unable to perform to the standard expected of the director, and shares her concerns with Nora. Throughout this discussion, Nora admits that she refused the role because her father and her “can’t really talk.” Rachel also discloses her dissatisfaction with her performance, questioning whether she was right to replace Nora. In Nora’s reply, Trier voices the reality of Gustav’s problematic paternal behaviours: “Well, he's a... very difficult person. But he's a really good director.” Like Lowell’s simile of the polar bear, Trier, through Nora, exhibits the truth about Gustav, that he is ill-fitted to both society and family life, and that his personality is better suited to the world of filmmaking, where his intentions appear to be more earnest and sincere.
In Lowell’s poem, the returning speaker is more reflective than Gustav is in Trier’s film. But like Gustav, the speaker uses their creativity to express their innermost disappointment regarding their role as a father. In the third stanza, the speaker laments the overgrown flowerbeds that once boasted a “pedigree” of tulips. Whilst the pictorial imagery of this might be in recognition of the time that has passed since he was last at home, it is also a metaphor that alarms the reader because of its tone and intention. In referring to the flowerbed as a “coffin's length of soil,” the morbid and melancholic attitude of the speaker highlights how his role as a father might have at one point been to tend, grow, and help shape the future of his child. But now, upon his return, this role is diminished to the purpose of surveying the erasure of a once-budding relationship. Some might find elegiac traits throughout the poem, and not only because of its reference to a “coffin,” but because its overall tone is reflective, and in assessment of the loss of what once was. For Gustav in Trier’s film, the stagnancy of his relationship with both his daughters isn’t continued. In the revival of their relationship, the three of them amend and alter to partially regenerate the dead tissue of what remains. The speaker in Lowell’s poem, however, isn’t guaranteed any sign of recovery. In the final two lines, the brutal diction of the speaker is terminal in its delivery. Ending with “I keep no rank nor station. Cured, I am frizzled, stale, and small,” Lowell resigns the speaker to an existence that is without role or responsibility, shrinking his role as a father to absolute nothingness. The irony of his being “cured” invites us to realise that in his recovery, he has lost what made him live, the paternal responsibility of being able care for his daughter to the best of his ability.
Both Home After Three Months Away and Sentimental Value resist any simple reverence for the parental figure, instead exposing the quieter, more intimate modes of failure that unfold within families shaped by absence, illness, and miscommunication. Where Lowell’s speaker internalises his inadequacy and diminishes himself into near-erasure, Trier’s Gustav externalises his failure, translating it into art rather than language. In doing so, both texts complicate the inheritance of damage that Larkin so bluntly articulates in his poem, suggesting that parental failure is not merely a matter of intent, but of capacity. Whether resigned to loss or tentatively reaching toward acceptance, these works remind us that the legacy of parenting is forged less through cruelty than through the fragile, imperfect ways parents attempt and often fail to remain present.
--
J.A.G Mabbutt is a poet, avid cinephile and writer. He has had both his poetry and writing published with Zimmer Magazine, Film East and Scribbled in the past year. Online you can find his poetry via @jag_poetry on instagram. In his day-to-day life, he is an English teacher based in Leicestershire. He studied at the University of Liverpool, receiving a degree in English Literature and History.