The Worst Person In The World is an exciting drama about how damn confusing your 30s are
There’s a love triangle, too, in this award-winner from Joachim Trier
Film Reviews The Worst Person in the World
The big centerpiece sequence in The Worst Person In The World is a breathtaking flight of fancy: an explicit break from the reality this sensitive, energetic drama of thirtysomething confusion has established up to that point. Increasingly dissatisfied in her relationship, and unable to shake her attraction to someone new, Julie (Renate Reinsve) presses a button in her brain, and suddenly everything around her becomes a tableau she can race through—cars and pedestrians frozen in place, the neighborhood at a standstill, like in that old Twilight Zone episode about the stopwatch that stops time.
These kinds of flourishes are a speciality of Norwegian director Joachim Trier, who loves to find inventive ways to visualize what’s going on in his characters’ restless, racing minds. Here, screeching the world to a sudden halt becomes an expression of Julie’s nagging wish to put everything on pause, and to find a moment out of time to entertain thoughts of something different. Who hasn’t yearned for a time out, just a fleeting respite from the endless forward charge of life and its tough decisions? This stylish daydream is also a nifty, lyrical way to capture that feeling of euphoria that can come over you when you realize you’re ready to end one romance and start another. (Think the bittersweet glee of Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend,” via images instead of words.)
In simplest terms, the film could be described as a love triangle, pitting Julie’s comfortable present with her brainy, stable, introverted comic-book-artist boyfriend, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), against all the intriguing possibilities of a future with Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), the handsome, friendly, younger stranger she meets by chance at a party she crashes. But Julie’s options aren’t really so binary. At her age, life is an endless series of diverging roads. Worst Person underlines that immediately, opening with a rush of incident that covers her time as a college freshman to her late 20s in one flowing montage, as she shuffles through boyfriends, majors, and hair colors.
Trier, working with his steadfast co-writer Eskil Vogt, divides The Worst Person In The World into 12 distinct chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. Like one of their previous collaborations, the undervalued Louder Than Bombs, the movie plays like a literary adaptation with no actual source material. It sprawls and digresses. On Julie’s 30th birthday, the camera strays like a wandering mind to a row of family photos, as an unidentified narrator starts rattling off everything her ancestors accomplished at her age. It’s a typically novelistic device, deployed to ask a larger question: How much of our lives are determined by the expectation put on us (or that we put on ourselves) to reach imaginary benchmarks? Trier poses it earlier, too, during a weekend with married, childed fortysomethings—an anecdote that underscores the differences in Julie and Aksel’s priorities, as determined by the gap in age between them.
One of the joys of Trier’s work is how he seems to have absorbed all the cool tricks of ’90s hotshot film-school renegades and filtered them through his own sensitive sensibilities. He’s like a bookish, bohemian Danny Boyle. In The Worst Person In The World, Trier expands and contracts time, accordion-style, to communicate how life itself can feel speed ramped, passing in a blur one minute and slowing to a crawl in another. Not all of his MTV-indebted gambits pay off. The film’s biggest swing and miss is an embarrassingly over-the-top drug trip sequence that swirls Julie’s unresolved issues into a hallucinatory nightmare reverie more goofy than anything else.
For all of Trier’s stylistic flair, the best scenes in The Worst Person In The World are unadorned conversations, little pockets of chemistry or conflict. The film peaks with a self-contained romantic episode, beautifully written and performed: the all-night meet cute between Julie and Eivind, who turn their promise not to cheat on their significant others into a seductive game of chicken, the two inching closer as they inch towards dawn. (Trier craftily stages one portion of their extended flirtation with infidelity in a bedroom that’s doubling as the coatroom, with regular intrusions by other guests coming to retrieve their belongings.) Later, the film mirrors this miniature rom-com with a realistically protracted breakup scene, punctuated with a declaration of paradoxical clarity: “Yes, I love you. But I also don’t love you.”
Trier has billed Worst Person as the closing installment of his “Oslo trilogy,” completing a thematically linked study of young adulthood in the big city that began with his electrifying debut, Reprise, and continued with the soulfully perceptive recovery drama Oslo, August 31st. The point of overlap is Danielsen Lie, the soft-spoken actor whose prominent role in all three films creates the impression of a coming-of-age story told across decades, exploring the growing pains of one’s 20s, 30s, and now 40s. Trier can’t seem to resist eventually ceding Worst Person to the older Aksel, with a melancholy subplot that pulls him to the center and a whole lament for a past era’s disappearing values delivered via extended maudlin monologue. It’s tempting to conclude that Trier is simply retreating to a perspective closer to his own, male and middle-aged. But this is also a film about squaring generational differences—about how worldviews change as doors start shutting along the way.
Trier never does quite seem to figure out who Julie is, deep down. Maybe that’s okay. Julie, after all, is still figuring out who she is, too. Reinsve, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes last summer, grounds the film in her ongoing journey of self-discovery, with all its shifting desires and realigned priorities. You can track a dramatic arc entirely through the emotions dancing across her face during a tedious party with Aksel’s friends or a chance reunion in the book store where she works. Even when The Worst Person In The World veers off course, her performance snaps it back to a truth of adulthood as a work in progress. Forget these two men. It’s a thousand different versions of her life that Julie’s really weighing—all the alternate futures that lay before us as we blindly steer down one fork in the road at the expense of another.
24 Comments
(Toccata and Fugue in D minor starts playing.)
this film started off strong but then faded for me, partly because it looks like it is going to be a black comedy (and the title suggests that) and it holds that out through the first scene with Eivind…but then they get to the breakup scene and the movie from then on is mostly about Aksel and eventually becomes as noted kind of maudlin…and it really seems to prioritize Aksel over the main character…and if you look at Aksel’s behavior from then on it is kind of questionable? It reminds me of Turks Fruit where it’s about a brilliant artist and his free spirit gf, but the real story is he was a controlling nutjob: Aksel dominates the much-younger Julie’s life, and then kinddddd of pressures her into breakup sex. He draws misogynistic cartoons and yells at a feminist, but the movie seems squarely on his side. Eivind is pretty much a nonentity from the moment he and Julie actually get together. I just wish it had stuck with Julie, let her be the main character in her own story, and made more of an effort to get to know her or the various hers instead of defining her so much by that one relationship. Where it ends up is certainly not where it looks like the movie is going from the first ten minutes.
How does the title suggest it’s a black comedy? Honestly curious.
the set up for the movie is “The Worst Person in the World” with the image of her joyfully running down the street. I actually expected it to be more along the lines of “You’re the Worst” along with the arch beginning of her essentially changing her major over and over, a tone that is abandoned. The overstatement of the title is clearly meant to be ironic, it’s just not 100% clear how comically ironic (think if it was called “History’s Greatest Monster” with that image…with your awareness of The Simpsons’ use of that phrase would you really show up expecting her to commit a few genocides?).Others have also noted that there are barely any other women in the film (the only other woman character is presented as pretty unstable and hysterical) and no women wrote it…I’m not saying it’s “Girl Who Can Hang, You’re Okay!” but it’s flawed. The title, as used in the movie, isn’t even used to refer to her, it’s to refer to Eivind. The reviewer says “Trier never does quite seem to figure out who Julie is, deep down” but to me it’s really not so much him falling short as that in giving up he pretty much turns it into Aksel’s movie for the last 1/4.
The movie has many satirical elements and satire is a form of comedy? A film depicting stereotypes and tropes of adulthood carries a comedic tone. Unless you take yourself very seriously. Then it’s a documentary.
Just your 30’s? Sorry to burst some peoples bubbles, but most peoples 40’s won’t be much different. You still won’t be able to afford a home and dating apps (if single) will still suck. Worse, people (both younger and older) will think you are supposed to “have it together” already.
Well, thanks
That’s awfully deterministic.
My 20s were WAY more confusing than my 30s. It took far too long for me to find what I wanted to do with my professional life and there was a ton of wheel spinning until I figured it out. Once I finally got a career track job at 31 things became much clearer. Of course then I had to figure out how to be a husband and a father which are far more difficult than transitioning from college student to professional.
What if we had our 30s and beyond in our 20s?
Not a Rom-Com fan in the slightest, but ended up watching this and was taken in. The nuances of film that get to us or not are beyond my ability to define, the characters, language, pace, vibe and flow resonate or they don’t, and this one did with me. I’m glad I watched it, and it stuck with me like a memorable meal. It’s worthy of checking out.
The various gimmicks in this film reminded me of nothing so much as Amélie, and I think it has a lot of the same charm, while telling a much more realistic, grounded, messily human story. I particularly liked the way time jumps were used to suggest all sorts of background events not included in the movie, which pays off very affectingly at the end. And it’s a cliché to say so, but much like the Montmartre movie, Worst Person really is a love letter to the city it is set in, portrayed gloriously with close attention to the geography and various neighborhoods of Oslo. There’s a reason Trier calls it his Oslo trilogy.
I didn’t feel it reverted to Aksel’s perspective towards the end, because it was still about how what he goes through affects Julie (one of those ways being that she doesn’t make it about herself). The fact that he is older, flawed and stuck in a Gen-X past she can’t directly relate to is a big part of that—and, we may suspect, part of what attracted her to him in the first place, given her shitty father.
Hm. For those of us who thought that Amelie was more than a little cutesy, how is Worst Person likely to sit?
I don’t think it should be a problem.
Many of the little cinematic flourishes of the film recall Amélie—it uses the same device of giving high-speed capsule biographies of minor characters, for example—but the overall story and characterization are far more serious.This is much more of a relationship drama than a romance, and we’re not meant to fall in love with the main character because of her quirky ways. (And she is not excessively quirky anyway.)
Your 30s are “damn confusing”? Nonsense.
I’ve heard a lot of great things about this movie, but I’ve also read that her boyfriend is writing a graphic novel and that she writes an essay that goes “viral” online, and I just don’t think I can do it.
Truly, it is embarrassing to acknowledge that some people make graphic novels or that writers publish pieces online that are sometimes very (if momentarily) successful (?!?!??!).
I generally liked the film, but found it a little hard to imagine that piece going viral, assuming we were supposed to be in the present day. Maybe Norwegian society is that different—I can’t pretend to be an expert—but considering how Europe is at least supposed to be more liberated regarding sex than the U.S., would an article by someone no one had heard of about how women feel ambivalent around oral sex really break through?
I think the movie is pretty reasonable in its thinking that an article like that could be shared relatively widely in an unexpected way (even if it wasn’t saying much of anything revolutionary)—and, even more so, in thinking that the net impact on her life/career/etc. wouldn’t ultimately be very much!
Then you really arent going to enjoy the upcoming NFTs from this film.
This is one of the dumbest comments I’ve ever read on this site
My 30s weren’t confusing. They are just alot of work that involved having 3 baby boys and getting them to pre teen years while also dealing with a major job layoff and having to move to another state for work and burning through a ton of our household cash reserves.But, yeah, I want to watch something about emotionally stunted adults going full on ouroboros.
Oh boy, a love triangle! Sure have never seen one of those before!
What a pointless moronic comment