On his recent trip to Beijing, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney praised the leadership of Xi Jinping and announced plans to bring 49,000 Chinese electric cars into Canada. In several ways that escaped notice, Carney was following in the footsteps of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. As David Frum notes, Trudeau “traveled to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union to participate in regime-sponsored propaganda activities,” a reference to the Moscow Economic Conference in April, 1952. Stalin’s USSR came billed as a workers’ state based on the “scientific” principles of Marxism-Leninism, as opposed to the “bourgeois” nations with their market economies. The regime’s admirers assumed that the Communist regime’s products would be superior, but it didn’t turn out that way. (RELATED: Carney Cozies Up to China) In the late 1970s, Prime Minister Trudeau allowed the USSR to sell the Soviet-built Lada in Canada. Like all cars produced by Communist regimes, the Lada was an inferior vehicle that failed to catch on with Canadians in a significant way. The “plagiarized Fiat,” as one reviewer called it, was built in the USSR, so the deal did not benefit Canadian auto workers, then struggling to compete with the surging Japanese. The Trabant, built in East Germany, was probably the most inferior automobile ever manufactured. By 1989, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, many had been consigned to dumpsters. In 1991, the Soviet Union passed into history, and the Marxist-Leninist torch was passed on to China. Jump ahead to Canada in November 2013. Pierre Trudeau’s son Justin, proclaimed, “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.” Actually, it doesn’t, as Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek showed in The Road To Serfdom, first published in 1944, during the heyday of Stalinism. Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister in 2015 and in 2025 succeeded by Mark Carney. Canada’s new PM is an apostle of John Kenneth Galbraith, not fond of Hayek, but like Pierre Trudeau, a big fan of the USSR. In 1984, Galbraith wrote, “It is evident that the Soviet economy has made great material progress in recent years,” when, for all but the willfully blind, it hadn’t. (RELATED: Mark Carney’s Mentor) The Chinese EVs Carney will bring into Canada are made in the People’s Republic of China, so his “landmark” deal will not benefit Canadian auto workers. By the time of the USSR’s collapse, Japanese and European cars had made huge inroads in North America. Toyota, Subaru, Honda, BMW, and Volkswagen now manufacture automobiles in the United States. The Chinese EVs Carney will bring into Canada are made in the People’s Republic of China, so his “landmark” deal will not benefit Canadian auto workers. On the other hand, Carney’s deal is sure to delight California Governor Gavin Newsom. (RELATED: While Canada Cozies Up to China, Mexico Imposes Harsh Tariffs Due to Chinese Auto Dumping) China’s biggest manufacturer of electric vehicles is Build Your Dreams (BYD). As the Los Angeles Times reported in 2018, BYD buses ran out of charge before their designated range and had trouble scaling the hills of Los Angeles, which are not particularly steep. In April 2020, Newsom struck a no-bid $1 billion deal with Build Your Dreams for masks. That year, Newsom issued an executive order mandating that by 2035, EVs would account for all new sales of cars and light trucks in California. The governor, who in 2023 hosted Xi Jinping in San Francisco, doubtless sees BYD as the major EV supplier, but there’s a problem here. California’s electric grid has trouble keeping up with demand. In the summer of 2022, California called on drivers not to charge their electric cars from 4-9 p.m., a common time for EV drivers to plug in. Back on December 20, a massive power outage in San Francisco left Waymo self-driving cars stranded, shut down two Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations, and affected commuter trains and traffic lights. While these problems endure, California was far ahead of Canada on a deal to benefit China, at the expense of American workers. For the new span of the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, California, a Chinese company used Chinese steel and brought Chinese welders and engineers aboard. The project came in 10 years late, $5 billion over budget, and riddled with corrosion, cracked rods, and such, raising safety concerns. UC Berkeley structural engineering professor Abolhasaan Astaneh-Asi told reporters he declined to use the bridge and warned about faulty design. “If a single component fails, the whole thing comes down,” the professor explained. (RELATED: China’s New Hongqi Bridge Collapses — Could California’s Chinese Bridge Be Far Behind?) Last November, a landslide caused China’s new Hongqi bridge to fracture and collapse, not the first such structure in the PRC to fail. In 2024, a bridge in China’s Shaanxi province collapsed, killing 15 people. Meanwhile, as David Frum explains, Pierre Trudeau, “to the extent he could, tried to reorient Canada away from the great democratic alliance.” With the pronouncement that Canada’s relationship with the USA “is over,” and his call for a new order, Prime Minister Carney seems to be pushing the same shift. If Canadians, especially the nation’s auto workers, see Carney as the second coming of Pierre Trudeau, it would be hard to blame them. READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley: A Different Midterm Milestone White Coat Supremacy, Greenland Style Gridlocked by Ideology Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

The Criterion Collection, which issues DVDs of classic films from around the world, has in its New York City offices an outsized closet containing floor-to-ceiling shelves of those DVDs. It also has a YouTube channel featuring brief videos on which well-known actors and directors select some of their favorite films from that library. Earlier this month, the veteran Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård made his picks, including The Seven Samurai, La strada, and Enfants du paradis. He called the closet a “fabulous gold mine of collective memory,” and added: “I love melodrama, but I hate sentimentality.” Eventually the viewer realizes that Gustav does love his family; it’s just that his principal way of expressing love is through filmmaking. That’s kind of funny, given that his current movie is entitled Sentimental Value. Directed by Joachim Trier from a script by Trier and Eskil Vogt, Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi in the original Norwegian) is the second Trier film to gain major international attention in recent years. His 2021 movie The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske), also co-written with Vogt, was nominated for the Oscars for Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay. The latter nod stunned Trier and his colleagues, given that films from countries like Norway rarely get nominated in categories other than Best International Feature Film. So imagine how Trier and company reacted the other day when Sentimental Value received no fewer than nine Oscar nominations — for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature Film, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress (two nominations), and Best Film Editing. (Actually, you don’t have to imagine it: it was recorded on video and posted on YouTube.) In a way, this extraordinary reception was a shock. No, it’s not the first European film ever to rack up so many Oscar nominations — Emilia Pérez (2024), that horrible musical about a Mexican cartel leader who decides to have sex-change surgery, received 13 nods, followed by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Roma (2018), both with ten apiece. But Sentimental Value now comes next on that list. And this is big news in Norway, because no Norwegian film had ever garnered more than the two nominations received by The Worst Person in the World. Moreover, the list of foreign-language movies to be nominated for Best Picture is a short one, heavy with genuine classics (Grand Illusion, Cries and Whispers) and with only one winner (Parasite). Does Sentimental Value merit such acclaim? Let’s start with this. Like The Worst Person in the World, it stars Renate Reinsve as a neurotic, offbeat, withdrawn young upper-class Oslo woman with relationship issues. This time around, she’s Nora Borg, an actress who’s semi-estranged from her father, Gustav (Skarsgård), a famous film director who put her in one of his movies when she was a little girl and who now wants her to star in his next one. Nora resents Gustav for being a largely absent, aloof father; her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) does too, although she’s more understanding of the old man. (Passing thought: how did this movie pass the newfangled rules for Academy Award nominations? Absolutely everybody in it is white and straight.) Eventually the viewer realizes that Gustav does love his family; it’s just that his principal way of expressing love is through filmmaking. He speaks of his film crew as a family. (There are echoes here of Fanny and Alexander.) Besides, he has good reasons for being bad at family intimacy. His mother, we learn, was a member of the Norwegian Resistance, was tortured by the Nazis, and ended up committing suicide in the family home (which is itself a major character in the film). Now Gustav wants to make a movie about a suicidal woman, although he insists — unconvincingly — that it’s not based on his mother’s life. When Nora turns down the role, he hires an American movie star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), whose name is curiously similar to that of the Redgrave sisters’ mother, Rachel Kempson (is that supposed to mean anything?), and whom he bonds with on a beach in a sequence that seems deliberately reminiscent of the closing scenes of Visconti’s Death in Venice. In recent years, Trier has come to be seen as Norwegian film’s answer to Ingmar Bergman and as someone who has almost singlehandedly created a golden age of Norwegian film. But on the privileged west side of Oslo — a city he has made his own, as Woody Allen did to New York (Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker profile of him is entitled “Joachim Trier Has Put Oslo on the Cinematic Map”) — he has more than his share of enemies. After the Oscar nominations rolled in, Bernhard Ellefsen, culture editor of Morgenbladet, Oslo’s counterpart to the New York Review of Books, who had already slaughtered Sentimental Value in print – twice – told an interviewer that he found it inappropriate that “such a film about love and family relations should get so much attention in a time when the world is burning.” In short, he’s the same kind of left-wing critic who gives Jane Austen a thumbs-down for paying insufficient attention to the Napoleonic Wars and British imperialism. Yes, Trier could possibly be criticized for ignoring the fact that Oslo has been heavily Islamized during the last twenty years. But Trier’s part of Oslo is still pretty much Islam-free. I could fault him for that. I choose not to, for the same reason that I wouldn’t condemn Austen for not writing War and Peace. In any event, if Trier were to try to deal with Islam as a problem in Oslo, Ellefsen would be one of the first critics to go after him, not for addressing Islam as a “burning” issue but for being an Islamophobe. I’ve said that in a way, the Oscar nods for Sentimental Value are a real shock. But in a way they aren’t. For one thing, even though there’s a language barrier here for most Academy members, there’s one way in which this film isn’t alien to them: it’s about moviemaking, and Hollywood has always loved movies about moviemaking — from Singin’ in the Rain and A Star Is Born to The Player and Once upon a Time in Hollywood. But there’s a lot more to it than that. This is a movie about three-dimensional people and credible relationships. It’s about family, and all the heavy baggage and the heartbreaking beauty that accompany it, across the generations. And there aren’t a lot of those coming out of Hollywood these days. Yes, the studios love raking in the profits from the car chases and animated features and explosions and special effects and superheroes, but even they usually know better than to give themselves awards for that crap. When the Oscar nominees were announced on January 22, the woman who introduced the broadcast said: “We live in a time of limitless technology that enables us to push the boundaries of our cinematic experience.” But she added: “Our profound belief is that the heartbeat of film is and will always remain unmistakably human.” And the simple fact is that this year, in order to find an unmistakable human movie to fill out several of the leading award categories, the Academy had to reach across the pond to Norway. And yes, even though its title is Sentimental Value, and even though both the opening and closing sequences may bring a tear to your eye, it can’t quite be accused of sentimentality, if only because Scandinavians don’t do sentimentality: what they do is feeling, at its best deep but restrained and even unspoken feeling; and it’s Trier’s genius for capturing the precious delicacies of human feeling in that distinctively subtle Scandinavian way that makes Sentimental Value so very dear.   READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Capote, 20 Years Later A Neglected Art Gets Its Due Guess What the New Yorker Thinks of the Kennedy Center’s New Name?