Meet Julie (Pronounced “Yoo-lee-ah” in Norwegian). She is not The Worst Person in the World. Not by a long shot. The title is just to draw you in. Did it work? I have certainly encountered many, many worse titles this year. But I digress.
Julie (Renate Reinsve) is young, attractive, intelligent, and cannot for the life of her figure out what she wants. Her brief cinematic biography is a tapestry ”told in twelve parts, plus a prologue and epilogue.” It’s possible that Julie has a different outlook for every section. It’s not that she’s bi-polar or schizophrenic; she just doesn’t know what she wants out of life. And the film essentially asks if she’s so different from us.
The Worst Person in the World immediately reminded me of the Bruce Springsteen lyric:
“Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack/
I went out for a ride and I never went back”
Except in this screenplay there are no kids and the town is Oslo, which is a great city for rhyming but not quite as lyrical (in English at least). Julie swaps boyfriends during the prolog; she also changes careers from doctor to psychologist to photographer and ends up as a part-time book barista in what I’m guessing is Bjarnes and Njoble. Her profession is just for the prologue; the film is about her relationships and how she gets through life. Some might call Julie “flaky” and while that description may be apt – especially to
those she’s cast aside- it doesn’t quite do her justice. The film doesn’t apologize for her behavior so much as ask if she’s really so bad – as underscored by the overexaggeration of a title.
At the end of the prolog, Julie shacks up with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), the author of a set of problematic comic books and a man fifteen years her elder. We know this relationship isn’t right, but Julie goes all in. The heart wants what it wants.
In Chapter 2: “Cheating,” Julie goes to a party and meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), a barista barista. Although the two never make physical contact nor even exchange names, they spend the entire night talking intimately with each other. (To be fair, a summer night in Oslo is what? Fifteen minutes long?) Both acknowledge that while completely sex-free, their night has veered into unfaithful territory. And again, the film asks, “What’s so bad?”
The Worst Person in the World hardly describes someone in search of our scorn; Julie is, in fact, the opposite. The biggest quibble I have with the picture is not that it hasn’t given us a rooting interest, but that many times, the film itself comes off as flighty as the heroine. I’m sure this is done on purpose to mimic the nature of the protagonist, but it left me emptier than it should have. I want to like Julie and to do so, she has to come around to the stability of the world, not the opposite. As a result, this is the kind of erudite artistic work you recommend to friends, but –aside from one well done romantic segment- not a film you need to see more than once.
There once was a woman from Oslo
Who treated commitment with “yeah … no.”
She wasn’t malicious
Nor her behavior suspicious
All the same, maybe don’t date her, y’know?
Rated R, 128 Minutes
Director: Joachim Trier
Writer: Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier
Genre: You think you have relationship problems …?
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People who can’t get their act together
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The eternally faithful
