Again the Worst Person for This

Julie (Renate Reinsve) overlooks the many life-choices she'due south nigh to make in The Worst Person in the World. Neon hide caption

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Julie (Renate Reinsve) overlooks the many life-choices she's about to make in The Worst Person in the World.

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Information technology'southward a setup, that title.

When we meet young Julie (Renate Reinsve), she's in the process of cycling through unlike career prospects (surgery, psychology, photography) and romantic partners. Nosotros wonder: Does filmmaker Joachim Trier intend for us to see the blithe caprice with which she abandons one discipline/lover and immediately takes up another as a graphic symbol flaw? A signal that Julie is, in fact, a terrible person?

Merely as we spend more time with Julie, nosotros realize that Trier and Reinsve aren't belongings her upward for either our condemnation or our approval; that championship's a winking joke. Instead, they're trying to map the emotional minefield that is immature machismo: a time when one'due south need for self-actualization and self-reliance spills over, all too frequently, into mere selfishness.

We may wince when Julie, out at a bar with a man, unceremoniously abandons him to strike up a conversation with an older, performatively jaded underground cartoonist (Anders Danielsen Lie) she finds more interesting. But it's not a cringe of disdain — it's one of intimate recognition.

The Worst Person in the Globe is the third and nigh fully realized moving-picture show in Trier's Oslo trilogy, which are more united by their common setting than any particular theme. Information technology's total of moments like that bar date — scenes in which a graphic symbol does or says something that's objectively hurtful to someone else, but in a style and so precisely rendered as to force the states to recall ourselves doing something similar, all besides clearly.

Julie aches to leave a relationship, but can't bring herself to practice and then cleanly — and so she picks a fight that dredges upward every statement they've ever had over the course of their entire time together, as an excuse to break upwardly? Check.

Julie walks domicile from an event being held for her cartoonist young man and crashes a party where she flirts mercilessly with a hot barista (Herbert Nordrum) who'due south also in a relationship — and the 2 spend the night negotiating with each other what does and does non technically count as cheating? Bank check.

Julie writes a aboveboard personal essay and shows it to her cartoonist boyfriend, who praises it — merely with besides niggling precision and specificity for Julie, enraging her? Oof. And: cheque.

Over again and again, The Worst Person in the World presents moments that invite our judgment, merely to proudly defy information technology. This is a function of a ruthlessly clear-eyed and observant screenplay by Trier and his longtime collaborator, Eskil Vogt. But information technology'due south Reinsve's wry, knowing functioning that really sells Julie as a woman on an ongoing search for something larger, and it swiftly becomes impossible to begrudge her this. We see the roots of that need in the selfishness of her male parent. And in one quietly astonishing montage, we realize the strength of her need is sufficient to stop time itself and allow her to run between the seconds, through the streets of Oslo, abroad from 1 lover and into the arms of another.

That sequence functions as both a parody of swoony romantic comedies and a non-so-sly indictment of the narcissism they frequently exude: Our dear is more important than the universe itself. Merely nosotros matter. Only usa.

The film is divided into 12 chapters, along with a prologue and epilogue. This might seem artificial or overdetermined — a desire on the film'south office to impose construction on Julie's constant messiness. Instead it gives the motion picture room to investigate different aspects of Julie'south life (and, in ane chapter, the life of Nordrum's hunky barista) without feeling disjointed or tonally askew.

The film's final human activity brings Julie, a beast of whim and caprice, into conflict with something inviolate and unyielding — the expiry of someone she loves. But instead of taking a turn for the maudlin, the film shows Julie remaining true to whom she's ever been, while admitting a new appreciation and empathy for those around her.

Tidy? Possibly. But it doesn't feel that fashion in the moment, because The Worst Person in the World is so deft at mining the truth from every cliche virtually life, romance and death. Information technology leaves you with an ache of recognition, the soft hurting of an onetime trample.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/04/1077225759/the-worst-person-in-the-world-review