Sentimental Value by Loki Olin

There are four boys sprawled like ragdolls on the couch of a Venice apartment, waiting out the rain. A movie is playing on the television. It has been selected for the purpose of killing time. Instead, the movie mesmerizes. It freezes the litter of boys, and then, like a puppeteer with four marionettes, rearranges them so that they are cross-legged and leaning forward, wide-eyed.

On the screen, a story unfolds: first, of a house that heaves, cracks, and sighs under the weight of the family that inhabits it. Then, of the family itself, of their return to the house, and the difficulties that await them there. There are glowing images of the sky over an umbrella-strewn beach in Deauville and of library walls lined with color-coordinated volumes.

The story’s characters carry burdens of regret, envy, and sadness. In attempting to broach these topics, language itself – or their use of it – fails them. “We can’t really talk,” the daughter says of her relationship with her father. It isn’t for lack of trying: He leaves her voicemails, and she talks to him when he is in the room. But both individuals are afflicted – the father by alcoholism, the daughter by depression – so the voicemails are stilted and drunken, and the daughter’s retorts fly across the dinner table before landing as jabs.

As the movie comes to an end, an imperfect solution emerges in the form of a creative act: The father, more facile with filmmaking than parenting, employs the processes of writing and directing to reach out to the daughter and express a nebulous sentiment that he cannot communicate to her in any other way. The movie does not suggest that this gesture resolves everything, or even that it is sufficient in and of itself. It is impactful only because of how it is received: with compassion and forgiveness. A bittersweet compromise has been reached in a sentiment imperfectly expressed and imperfectly acknowledged – but expressed and acknowledged nonetheless.

The movie ends, and the boys go to the gym.

One boy pedals a stationary bicycle. He has an image frozen into his mind: the daughter lying still on the carpeted floor of a bedroom, one cheek smushed to the ground, another striped by hairs held in place by a teardrop adhesive. On the bike, he is silent. The movie and this image have rendered him mute.

Another boy does push-ups. The image he has taken from the movie is shifting and elusive. He sees the father, both daughters, and the deceased mother – a portrait of a broken family. He wonders if it is ever too late to make amends. Between push-ups, he poses this question to the group. He wants, or needs, to talk about the movie. 

The boy hanging from the pull-up bar drops down to the ground. He listens to the chatter pouring out of the boy doing push-ups. He notices that nothing pours out of the boy on the bicycle. He determines that the boys have ingested this movie together, but each must digest it in his own way.

The fourth boy is doing squats. He is always attuned to the gears that turn in the heads of the others. Now, the gears turn in his own, and a thought occurs to him: He has spent two hours with these boys on many occasions, but never before in such silence.

The chatter goes on for a while, and then it dies down. The conversation veers in another direction. Some things are left unsaid. After all, the boys have their own afflictions. The boys have their own digestive processes. They even have their own cities: In the days to come, they will scatter across the country and resettle in their respective homes. They will not know when the next two hours will come. For now, they agree that this was one hell of a movie and as solid a choice as any for a rainy day. With this sentiment expressed and acknowledged, they return to their exercises.