The trailer for the Norwegian Oscar hopeful The Worst Person in the World is my favorite kind of teaser, the kind that says nothing about the story. Some cryptic dialogue is exchanged; a woman runs through an empty street in a fugue of exaltation; a carpet rushes headlong to meet her as she falls prostrate onto it. We know nothing of the plot, but we’re primed for something kinetic, and the movie delivers as promised.
Opacity is indeed the best marketing strategy for a film whose narrative rudiments are all too familiar. It’s essentially girl meets boy, their relationship stagnates, and girl meets another boy, only to find herself repeating old patterns of rootlessness and insecurity.
The Worst Person in the World is unabashedly anchored in classical romantic-comedy syntax. Director Joachim Trier has cited Richard Curtis and Cameron Crowe as influences, and there are occasional echoes of Woody Allen. But it’s the tonal shifts and surprising left turns, in both script and execution, that elevate this wise and observant exploration of a young woman who, despite her talent, charm and beauty, finds herself unmoored from adulthood’s demands, and even from her own choices. “I feel like I’m a spectator in my own life,” she says.
This is Julie (breakout star Renate Reinsve, who took Best Actress at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival), whom we follow for approximately four years, beginning with a postgraduate malaise in which she abandons medical school to study psychology, then jettisons that to be a photographer. When that doesn’t pan out, she aspires to be a writer, all the while earning a paycheck as a bookstore clerk.
Julie is plagued by a wandering eye. When out with her first boyfriend, she meets Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), an underground comic book artist 15 years her senior, and it’s not long until they move in together, despite a simmering disagreement on having children (he’s ready, she isn’t). Bored at one of Aksel’s book-release soirees — and embarrassed to answer the question what do you do for a living? by Oslo’s literati — Julie leaves early, only to stumble upon, and crash, a wedding. This is where she meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). Their eyes connect and it’s game over, despite both being in committed relationships.
I’ve never seen anything quite like the sequence that follows, in which Julie and Eivind, desirous of each other but unwilling to sacrifice their partnerships, engage in all manner of intimate behavior that falls just short of cheating. It’s arguably the sexiest sexless scene in the movies since Greta Garbo caressed, for three screen minutes, the objects in the room where she trysted with a Spanish envoy in 1933’s Queen Christina.
The moment feels like something revolutionarily subversive, and it goes part and parcel with the film’s liberated approach to female sexual autonomy. At a dinner party with Askel’s friends, Julie bemoans that “women’s problems” remain so culturally taboo; “If men had periods, it’s all we’d hear about,” she says — pithy and inarguable. Later, she’ll publish an edgy online essay that goes viral, stirring controversy, if not a career change, for its author: “Oral Sex in the Age of #MeToo.” When Aksel reads it, his review summarizes much of The Worst Person in the World’s own dichotomous appeal: “It’s pretty cerebral, but it turns me on, too.”
For all its timely themes and authentic, conversational writing, Trier is unafraid to boldly break away from traditional realism, and from audience expectations. Though told in 12 “chapters” and a prologue and epilogue, The Worst Person in the World is not novelistic; its satisfactions are unique to its medium. When Julie makes the decision to pursue Eivind beyond their chaste wedding-party dalliance, Trier presents it as a storybook liaison: Time stops, and everyone in their field of vision freezes in place. It’s an exhilarating rendezvous, but it’s a double-edged escape — an acknowledgment that the relationship is predicated on an impossibility, a fantasy, an artifice.
Trier tops himself a few scenes later when Julie ingests magic mushrooms, and we experience her anxieties filtered through a psilocybin consciousness: a Lynchian fever dream in which, among other psychic confrontations, various assaulters manhandle her body, which has become flabby and elderly, while an audience watches from a theater.
Over the course of The Worst Person in the World, we see, through Reinsve’s emotionally naked and complex performance, Julie’s youthful radiance hardened by the fluorescent glare of adulthood. It’s a coming-of-age story of sorts, a reality that we can still come of age in our 30s, or older. If she can survive what awaits her, in the traumatic final third of this tender feature, perhaps there’s hope for all of us.
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD. Director: Joachim Trier; Cast: Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum; Distributor: Neon; Rating: R; In Norwegian with English subtitles; Opens: Friday, Feb. 18, at Living Room Theaters at FAU in Boca Raton and O Cinema South Beach in Miami