The heroine ofJoachim Trier‘s latest film ‘The Worst Person in the World‘ (2021) is about 30 years old, but she still hasn’t managed to find a profession that would give full meaning to her life, or the man she would like to be with and spend the rest of her life, or what could make her happy. It is, if you wish, the film of her searches and the failure of these searches in a hurried and individualistic world. This contemporary Norwegian counter-heroine is one of the most complex and interesting female characters I have seen on screen in recent years. Renate Reinsve‘s formidable performance brought her a well-deserved award for female performance at the Cannes Film Festival. This is one of the important reasons, but not the only one for which this film is worth seeing.
Julie (Renate Reinsve) is an intelligent and intellectually gifted young woman. She starts studying medicine and then gives up, starts studying psychology and abandons this as well, decides to become a photographer and works in parallel and as a bookseller at a bookstore. Her parents are divorced, she is closer to her mother (who is worried about her daughter’s un-decisions) while her distant and indifferent father is a negative model that probably makes her wary of relationships with men. And yet she falls in love, not with one man but with two: with a comics book writer and cartoonist about 14 years her senior who wants a child and with a seller at a pastry shop who wants to have fun and maybe to get rid of his previous girlfriend who is more interested by ecology and vegetarianism. Time passes, life advances, but it is not clear in which direction.
I guess that one of ‘Joachim Trier‘s sources of inspiration are Woody Allen‘s older and newer films. The organization of the story in 12 chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue, the well-matched use in this case of off-screen voice, the relationship between lovers separated by age gap, the presence of parents in the lives of mature people, all these they reminded Allen. Even the almost exclusively urban setting seems inspired by his films, with a local touch, of course. If you haven’t visited Oslo (like me) by the time you finish watching this movie you will feel the desire to visit this city, which looks colorful, sophisticated, and … warm (most of the story seems to take place in the summer). The location in time is clear, thanks to the pandemic masks that the characters wear in the epilogue. Just count a few years back. There are at least two chapters in the film with original cinematography that fits well into the logic of the story – the imaginary or real encounter between lovers looking for and finding each other with the rest of the world frozen around and the sequence of the ‘experimentation’ with hallucinogenic mushrooms. ‘The Worst Person in the World‘ is the story of an imperfect woman with an imperfect life, as are the lives of most of us, a woman who is certainly not the worst person in the world, and the film about her is made interestingly and well acted. Recommended viewing.