In The Worst Person in the World, Norway’s shortlisted nom for best international film at the Oscars, Joachim Trier is once again interested in characters who aren’t quite sure they are leading the lives they should. With Reprise, the first entry in Trier’s so-called Oslo Trilogy, his characters were looking to become major literary figures in Norway. In the second, Oslo, August 31st, a man is convinced he is lost, having lost a couple years of his life to addiction. Here, Trier is again meditating on youth, love, time and ambition. This time, though the protagonist is a woman. She has the same existential angst as her fictional forbears (both of whom were played by the dependably brilliant Anders Danielsen Lie, who is superb here in a supporting role) but there is the added trick of biology—and unlike the men before her, she is more given to change. Over the length of the film, she changes lovers, changes jobs, changes her mind.
She is in her twenties and is eager to figure out what exactly she needs to do and who exactly she wants to be. This is why, within the film’s first few scenes, she stops being a student studying for a medical degree and not long after abandons a lover at a party when she meets Aksel (Danielsen Lie), an attractive cartoonist. Aksel is older and, because he understands Julie’s restless nature, offers to break up; but she decides she’s in love with him and thus begins a relationship that gives Trier, who helms the screenplay alongside Eskil Vogt, an opportunity to convey some interesting ideas about modern love. The turns the relationship takes and Trier’s commitment to frank portrayals of this couple, in particular, make it certain this film will find its audience (and potential fervent loyalists) among young people navigating romance and seeking meaning wherever it may be found in the world.
The film could be thought of as a romantic comedy, but the comedy is of the acrid sort. You could think of it as a coming of age story, but there is an active resistance to the concept of growing up. And as told in twelve chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue, Julie’s story may in fact be a book. Trier’s style and concerns marks him out as one those directors who perhaps would have been a novelist if literature hadn’t receded in status over the last couple decades. And as with certain novels, there is some variation in points-of-view across the chapters. Deftly, in one chapter featuring an omniscient point-of-view, Trier adopts an all-knowing opinionated voice-over for his main characters. “At 30, she’s comparing herself to Bambi,” it says at some point.
For a different kind of director, this structure might be a cop-out, allowing for a certain stream of consciousness/non-linear style but, while that might even be so here, Trier retains a fidelity to basic chronology. And there are cinematic flourishes, too, as in one scene, engineered by editor Olivier Bugge Coutte and DOP Kasper Tuxen, where the city literally stands still for Julie and a lover to meet.
The film’s true cinematic delight is Reinsve, who grabbed the Best Actress award at Cannes and is, from start to finish, not actually acting. She is being. Her Julie is incredibly selfish and often annoying but the performance is exquisite. The titular description is explicitly used in the film for someone else but there is never any doubt that Julie is indeed the worst person in the world—or at least, in the private world necessarily created by lovers. Maybe this elects her as an artist—or one of those types with an artist’s neuroses but little of the talent. She does take a stab at being a writer but we never really see much of her writing, save for one essay on “Oral Sex in the Time of #MeToo”, which conveys an ambivalence towards the movement that would feel much more natural coming from a female director. Fortunately, Reinsve’s committed performance absolves Trier of the accusation that he is channeling his own thoughts about #MeToo.
Running just over two hours, this brilliant film has some sagging in the middle. It certainly features a lot of talk, most of it insightful about romance in a way that recalls Woody Allen, who receives a sorta homage when one character utters a slightly altered version of Allen’s famous anti-death declaration, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.”
Is that Trier, through some narrative ventriloquism, humorously angling for immortality? Who knows. But for the here and now, he has made a film worthy of praise.
Director: Joachim Trier
Screenplay: Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier
Cast: Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum
Cinematographer: Kasper Tuxen
Editor: Olivier Bugge Coute
Production companies: Oslo Pictures, MK Productions, Film i Väst, Snowglobe, B-Reel Films
Distributors: SF Studios (Norway), Memento Distribution (France), TriArt Film (Sweden), NEON (North America)
Duration: 122 minutes
In Norwegian
