GFF22: The Worst Person in the World
Joachim Trier’s odyssey through four years of the life of Julie - a near-thirty-year-old woman struggling with an internal battle about what she wants from adult life - will resonate with every young person who watches it.
Joachim Trier’s latest film follows Julie (Renate Reinsve) as she navigates her late twenties, making life decisions that seem right for her at the time, but always seem to end up making her completely disintegrate just a little bit quicker than it had been before.
The Worst Person in the World is packaged as a prologue, 12 main chapters, and an epilogue. In the prologue, we meet Julie as she studies medicine at university in Oslo. But then she realises she doesn’t want to study the human body, she wants to study the human brain, so she switches her university studies to psychology. A while later, Julie is flicking through the pictures on her iPhone and realises she really likes the visual medium; the enjoyment of perfectly framing your subject matter in a picture. So she scraps psychology, and trains to become a photographer.
The prologue is designed to show us Julie’s impulsive nature; how she can jump between things easily. These impulsive career changes conveniently set us up for the main 12 chapters of the film; which centre on Julie entering a relationship with a man about 15 years her senior, cartoonist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). Though they are ostensibly happy, they often battle over their different views on their approach to life and what they want for their future: whether they want kids, what they do for fun, and how they socialise.
A chance encounter leads Julie to meet Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) at a party. Eivind is the same age as Julie, and they spend the night falling for each other by exploring every possible conversation topic and silly game to keep them occupied without actually cheating on their respective partners. They agree to withhold their last names, so neither person can seek the other out on social media, meaning they can keep the night as a fond memory without the temptation for anything more. As you would expect, that’s not how things pan out, and another encounter results in Julie leaving Aksel for Eivind. After that moment, just about everything starts to go wrong for everyone involved.
It’s not that there’s any suggestion of some sort of supernatural force of karma that is punishing Julie – it’s the opposite. Trier’s film is blunt in its position that this is just how life works. You do things that seem like the right idea, and they can backfire. Good people can get hurt. Good people can get ill. Good people’s lives don’t always pan out the way they want them to.
The Worst Person in the World starts brilliantly, moving through the prologue and first few chapters with impressive style. A soundtrack can set a film apart or boost it to a new level, and the first half of the film contains a constant flow of upbeat popular music that perfectly accompanies our introduction to Julie. Renate Reinsve’s performance is truly perfect; an example of masterfully casting a new talent in a role that she will likely remain synonymous with for the remainder of her career. In part, this is probably because of the anonymity that having no previous acting credits (aside from one scene in an earlier Trier film ten years prior) grants you, meaning it feels like Reinsve is simply playing herself on screen. That’s not to say it’s the unfamiliarity of Reinsve that makes her so good in the film - she captures the essence of every shy and unsure young adult; the wide-eyed innocence, the embarrassed laughter, the ability to carry herself with an air of someone who is both self-assured and uncomfortable in the same moment. That’s why she won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 2021, is nominated for a BAFTA, and is seen by many as unlucky to have missed out on a nod at the Academy Awards.
The film peaks as Julie decides to end her relationship with Aksel and pursue something with Eivind; Trier deploys a freeze-frame/still-life effect, with Julie running through Oslo while everyone else around her is frozen in time. It’s not the first time we’ve seen it in a film and it won’t be the last, but it’s executed perfectly here.
Just when it appears that everything has fallen into place for Julie, things in her life begin to crumble. It’s a notable change of pace from the slick fun of the first half, but that shift in tone exemplifies the point of the film, of being an adult: yes, there’s fun, good times, great music and laughter, but sometimes you need to deal with the heavier stuff too.
Now time for a disclaimer from the author. I first saw this film at Cannes in July of 2021 and gave it a measly 3/5 during my recap of the festival. My only defence is that it was the second film that I had seen that day - in quick succession - and film fatigue clouded my judgement over the second half of the film. The change of pace from the first to the second half hit me as hard as the hangover that was creeping in from the night before. But here I am, fronting up and admitting my mistakes; showing you that, like Julia in The Worst Person in the World, doing the wrong thing, being indecisive and some times pulling a dramatic U-turn is part of growing up.