Getting to Know “The Worst Person in the World”

My lukewarm feelings for Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which has just been nominated for nine Oscars, has made me wonder: in watching the film on my big-screen TV, was I missing something? Or was I just not in the right mood to appreciate a low-key domestic drama about a Norwegian absentee father and his grown daughters? Particularly in regard to the film’s leading lady, the Oscar-nominated Renate Reinsve, I read several times the comment that she’d been even more memorable in Trier’s previous film, 2021’s The Worst Person in the World. Great title, that! I decided to see for myself what the critics had found so mesmerizing.

 So now I know: Reinsve is indeed mesmerizing, in a film apparently built around her charmingly contradictory personality. (The role won her a Best Actress award at Cannes, and shot her to international fame.) In The Worst Person in the World, she plays Julie, a very bright but quite mixed-up young woman who can’t decide on a direction for her adult life. En route to becoming a surgeon, she suddenly decides to chuck the scrubs and study psychotherapy. That doesn’t work either, when she concludes that “I don’t want to become a spectator in my own life.” So she tries photography, but basically works in a bookstore while trying to solve the riddle of her impending future.

 That riddle comes to revolve more and more around her love life. There’s a semi-famous underground cartoonist (Aksel), who adores her, but also—at age 45—is starting to crave a family. There’s also a barista (Elvind) with whom she shares some naughty fun while on the lam from a dull reception, though he has romantic commitments elsewhere. The single most special part of the movie occurs about midway through, when Julie realizes (for the moment, at least) that she wants to leave Aksel for Elvind. This is the section of the film that cast and crew refer to as “Frozen.” A casually-dressed Julie leaves Aksel’s flat and runs down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. There she starts to jog and then run . . . passing multitudes of Oslo residents, all of them frozen in place as they swing their briefcases, wheel their bikes, check their cellphones, smooch their girlfriends. Throughout Norway’s busy capital city, she seems to be the only person who’s truly alive as she races to the coffee bar to claim her new love. In a DVD featurette, director Trier explains both how the footage was shot and what it means: when you realize you’re in love, “you’re in your own time zone.”

 After this bravura midpoint, far be it from me to reveal where we find Julie at film’s end, though it lines up with Trier’s own passion for the cinematic arts. The conclusion meshes nicely with several other kinds of endings we see (or intuit) among this film’s characters, but there’s also a hint that perhaps Julie has finally arrived at an unexpected sort of peace. Which, of course, is not quite the same thing as happiness. On the strength of the two films I’ve seen, Trier (who’s both a writer and a director) has a special gift for bringing his films to a conclusion, one that both wraps up the current story and suggests where we go from here.

 Perhaps the secret ingredient of Trier’s cinematic tales is time. Like Julie coursing through the busy streets of Oslo, time doesn’t stand still. It brings changes—both good ones and bad ones—and it’s the role of human beings like Julie to go along for the ride.