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.

 

 

 

On the Couch with "Sentimental Value"

For months I wanted to watch Sentimental Value, the Norwegian family drama (by auteur Joachim Trier) that won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has just been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Though recently more and more foreign-language films have been nominated for top Oscar honors, this film’s haul has been particularly impressive, including Best Original Screenplay and four acting noms (for Renate Reinsve as Best Actress, for both Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas as Best Supporting Actress, and for screen veteran Stellan Skarsgård as Best Supporting Actor). Among the kudos already won by Sentimental Value is recognition from AARP’s annual Movies for Grownups, which has its own unique categories for films of special interest to older folk. AARP named Sentimental Value the year’s “Best Intergenerational  Film.”

It’s easy to see why Seniors who appreciate art-films might go for this one. No guns, no spilled guts, no things that go bump in the night, unless you’re talking about painful memories. Just a quiet family drama, involving two grown daughters, their estranged father, and several others caught in the orbit of a Norwegian household whose members are prominent in the European arts community. I have loved many Scandinavian films over the years, starting with the masterpieces of Ingmar Bergman, and I suspected Sentimental Value would be a pleasant change from recent highly lauded but deliberately over-the-top American flicks like Sinners and One Battle After Another.

Here’s what surprised me: when I watched on the big-screen TV in my living room, Sentimental Value seemed almost too low-key. Its characters’ struggles to bind old wounds struck me as  convincing, but not always interesting. I wanted something exciting to happen, beyond talky scenes in various quiet locales—a bedroom, a café, a beach. The low-key conversations did contrast in an interesting way with the theatricality built into the subject matter. The father is a world-famous director; his #1 daughter Nora is an acclaimed stage actress. At the start of the film, it’s opening night at a huge and prestigious theatre, and Nora (dressed in a period gown that suggests she’s playing an Ibsen heroine) is in a state of total panic. She’s absolutely convinced that she can’t possibly play her role, and she does everything she can think of—to the consternation of cast and crew—to avoid going on stage. Then, finally, she does make her entrance . . . and the performance is a triumph.

So we know Nora is a self-centered neurotic, but it remains to meet the rest of the family, This occurs after the funeral of Nora’s mother, when friends and relatives gather at the historic family homestead. An unexpected arrival is Nora and her sister’s estranged father, who long ago left the family behind to pursue his directing ambitions. Now he’s back, at least partly to further the new project with which he hopes to revitalize his career. The script he’s written focuses on the final days of his own mother, who had been an heroic anti-Nazi partisan in World War II. He wans to film in the family home, and he wants Nora to step into his mother’s role. By the film’s end, we understand everyone’s emotional connections, and see the possibility of reconciliation. But it takes a long time to get there, and I confess I was a bit confused by the off-screen characters (a mother, a grandmother) who are so much responsible for these family members’ deeply-felt emotions.

I wonder: would I have liked this film better in the cineplex? Do certain quiet, serious movies just not work as couch-films?